Harvard Music Sharing Study

[Force Flow]

Harvard just released a study that says music downloading has almost zero impact on sales. Although the RIAA will no doubt dispute this study…I am inclined to believe in a Harvard study over anything the RIAA says. Researchers at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina tracked music downloads over 17 weeks in 2002, matching data on file transfers with actual market performance of the songs and albums being downloaded. Even high levels of file-swapping seemed to translate into an effect on album sales that was "statistically indistinguishable from zero," they wrote. ... Even in the most pessimistic version of their model, they found that it would take about 5,000 downloads to displace sales of just one physical CD, the authors wrote. Despite the huge scale of downloading worldwide, that would be only a tiny contribution to the overall slide in album sales over the past several years, they said.

http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5181...l?tag=nefd_top

~From HardOCP


I think we all know by know that the RIAA will do almost anything to get a buck in their pocket.

[oddjob]

Originally posted by oddjob Don't know where I heard the statistic, but so it goes; people who own CD burners are more likely to purchase music, than download it via a fileshare program like Kazaa. I suppose the same thing might apply to many people who own mp3 players. They have the technology to pirate music, but just don't. The RIAA can't stop technology from advancing, and sales still thrive.

excerpt from this thread related to the topic.