How Real of a Loss?
In A Heretical View of File Sharing, a NewYork Times article, an interesting question is asked: What if file sharing is not hurting record sales?
"Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates," write the authorsor a study on the subject, Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School and Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
They also make the point that the RIAA treats every downloaded song as lost revenue. That is just simply not true. They use the example of a free trip to make their point: if someone offers you a free trip to Florida, you are very likely to go, if you have to pay for it, the odds go way down. It's the same for music.
By the RIAA's logic, the 14 year old with 1000 downloaded mp3s on his computer would have spent 2000$ buying all this music had it not been available free. I highly doubt that. Instead, he would have had saved up his paper route money to buy a 20$ cd with only one or two good songs on it.
We all know discovering new artists and musical styles is evil, Go RIAA!
In A Heretical View of File Sharing, a NewYork Times article, an interesting question is asked: What if file sharing is not hurting record sales?
"Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates," write the authorsor a study on the subject, Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School and Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
They also make the point that the RIAA treats every downloaded song as lost revenue. That is just simply not true. They use the example of a free trip to make their point: if someone offers you a free trip to Florida, you are very likely to go, if you have to pay for it, the odds go way down. It's the same for music.
By the RIAA's logic, the 14 year old with 1000 downloaded mp3s on his computer would have spent 2000$ buying all this music had it not been available free. I highly doubt that. Instead, he would have had saved up his paper route money to buy a 20$ cd with only one or two good songs on it.
We all know discovering new artists and musical styles is evil, Go RIAA!
