(U-WIRE) - The Recording Industry Association of America has long been a vocal proponent of the idea that file sharing costs sales. There's no minimizing the impact of illegal file-sharing. It robs songwriters and recording artists of their livelihoods
and it ultimately undermines the future of music itself not to mention threatening the jobs of tens of thousands they say, and lots of surveys exist to back them up.
However, dissatisfied by the fallibility of surveys based on asking people whether or not they were breaking the law, two professors, Felix Oberholzer-Gee (Harvard Business School) and Koleman Strumpf (UNC Chapel Hill) decided to take a different approach. They tapped into the remnants of Napster in 2002, collected data on what songs were being traded over the course of some 17 weeks, and matched that to the concurrent sales of the albums being traded online.
Their result? Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero
despite rather precise estimates.
Yes, that's right. Statistically indistinguishable from zero.
In case that didn't spell it out clearly enough, they also note, These estimates are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales.
The explanation that Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf give is simple: Getting the music free doesn't actually affect whether people buy albums. People who were likely to buy albums anyway still by and large do so. People who were unlikely to buy music won't, although they may download it. To use their analogy, if someone offers you a free trip to Florida, you'll probably take it, but that doesn't mean that you'd have gone to Florida (or even been likely to go) without the free ticket.
Now, we've known for a while that file sharing doesn't hurt artists. Many of them support it because it spreads their music. Moreover, most artists see so little of the money from their album royalties when all is said and done that any drop in sales would barely touch them. Their primary income is almost always from tours, not albums. But this suggests that the recording industry isn't being hurt by file sharing, either. Digital rights activists have been suggesting this for years, but now there's some evidential weight behind it.
The RIAA was quick to denounce the study, saying that it runs counter to all the other studies on the subject - that is, survey evidence. I'm tempted, however, to agree with Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf that there may be reason to suspect surveys based on querying people about illegal activity.
This does, however, underscore the crucial flaw in the RIAA's crusade against music downloaders: Ultimately, it's a bad idea to sue your customers. By attacking people who are downloading music - ordinary folks, mostly - the RIAA makes itself look bad and further alienates an already polarized consumer base.
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Evan Hensleigh
