Researchers at two leading U.S. universities have issued a study countering the music industry’s central theme in its war on digital piracy by saying file sharing has little impact on CD sales.
“We find that file sharing has only had a limited effect on record sales,” Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf of University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill said in their report.
“The economic effect is also small. Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed to displace a single album sale,” they wrote.
The Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group representing the music industry, was quick to denounce the report’s conclusions.
“Countless well-respected groups and analysts, including Edison Research, Forrester, the University of Texas, among others, have all determined that illegal file sharing has adversely impacted the sales of CDs,” RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss said in a statement. [more @ www.reuters.co.uk]