Suddenly something. Nepster is, don’t know yu’ll agree with me or not but had been the favorite punching bag of the brick and mortar music industry. Things change so fast. Remember in 1997 when digital music first made it big. Music was sailing through telephone lines. Nepster happened and copyright stuff became absolutely free. Before the big players could respond more than 20 billion listeners got access to more than H A L F a B I L L I O N numbers. Before Warner Bros could file a case tons of newspaper prints and web pages were read and debated.
From a review of some recent economic papers on the impact of file sharig:
First is the differential impact of file-sharing on an artist depending on their existing popularity. According to Blackburn who investigates this issue the ‘bottom’ 3/4 of artists sell more as a consequence of file-sharing while the top 1/4 sell less. Second is the first tentative estimates (by Waldfogel and Rob) of the welfare consequences of file-sharing. Waldfogel and Rob’s dramatic result is that file-sharing on average yields a gain to society three times the loss to the music industry in lost sales.
There you have it: file sharing is good for society and the little guy, bad for the music industry and all the major artists (who make up the bulk of sales).
Didn’t we know that already?
Ask Boing Boing
