[article]File sharing makes no difference to record sales

Scruff

theinquirer has a story here on new research carried out jointly by Harvard Business School and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill that finds that

in 2002 music sales were unaffected by the increase in file sharing, and the industry may have even benefited from it.

interestingly

In addition the Harvard/North Carolina study found that in a "worse case scenario" it would take more than 5000 downloads to reduce album sales by a single copy.

The authors said: "If this worst-case scenario were true, file sharing would have reduced CD sales by two million copies in 2002. To provide a point of reference, CD sales actually declined by 139 million copies from 2000 to 2002."

i'm sure that lovely group the RIAA will have their own "independent" report out soon enough to rebuff this one.

goo

(laughing)

Yeah, that or sue the paper.

projectmayhem

meh.

the new korn video is about the music industry (ironically enough) but it uses information done by indipendant sources....

monument

“found that in 2002 music sales were unaffected by the increase in file sharing”

Bearing in mind that that a large percentage of people illegally file sharing music in 2002 would have been doing so long before 2002, so any report mainly based only on 2002 sales is flawed.

(BTW I don’t agree with coping any media with out the copyright holders approval, however the music biz still need to fully catch up with the times, and the price differences of online and high street retail for CDs really needs to be looked at - solution buy CDs where ever is cheapest.)