Posted by mikezillion at February 12th, 2007

I love studies like this. The Journal of Political Economy just published a study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf which claims that the 80 million unit decline in CD sales in 2002 could not have been the direct result of online file sharing. There simply wasn’t enough music traded, no matter how the numbers are sliced. The music industry has been blaming piracy for declining sales, and using the argument to justify more and more draconian digital rights management schemes. Isn’t it just possible that the quality of the content has an impact on the sales volume, too?