What is the real impact of downloading on record album sales?
Looking around it is easy to find research that claims to prove whatever it is that you would like to believe about file sharing’s impact on album sales. Basically, the people who’ve done serious studies seem to have major disagreements. About the only thing they do agree about is that they are trying to estimate things that are very hard to know. The original research papers are full of complex mathematics, statistical analysis and economic models. They are not understandable by the lay person, and even if you are trained in those fields they are not understandable without serious study. Their validity is very difficult to judge. “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis” by the Felix Oberholzer‐Gee from Harvard and Koleman Strumpf of the University of Kansas concludes that: “Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Our estimates are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the decline in
