File sharing has no effect on CD sales, a pair of US academics have claimed.
The finding will not make pleasant reading for the music industry, which claims file-sharing is the cause of the huge decline seen in North American, German and Italian CD sales.
Harvard Business School Associate Professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Professor Koleman Strumpf of the University of North Carolina base their claim on research carried during the Autumn and Winter of 2002 to compare song download volumes with CD album sales.
The duo used data taken directly from file-sharing networks to calculate the number of genuine downloads made during a 17-week period. They also looked at official US CD sales data. Factors such as network congestion, song length – ie. download duration – as well as international school and college holidays were taking into consideration. They then used statistical methods to work out whether the sale of an album declines if it is downloaded more frequently.
The result, the professors say, is that there is no such connection.
“File sharing has no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample,” their report states. “Moreover, the estimates are of rather modest size when compared to the drastic reduction in sales in the music industry. At most, file sharing can explain a tiny fraction of this decline.” [more @ www.theregister.co.uk]