researchers say downloads are not the cause of declining recording sales infact the entire north american entertainment industry form hollywood to music are suffering
tv networks are losing audience, fm radio is losing listners since the late 1990s, hollywood is losing money, and shows like Law and order and CSI and other network shows are losing audience. north american entertainment sucks especially crap from the U.S
File sharing has no effect on CD sales, a pair of US academics have claimed.
The finding will not make pleasant reading for the music industry, which claims file-sharing is the cause of the huge decline seen in North American, German and Italian CD sales.
Harvard Business School Associate Professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Professor Koleman Strumpf of the University of North Carolina base their claim on research carried during the Autumn and Winter of 2002 to compare song download volumes with CD album sales.
The duo used data taken directly from file-sharing networks to calculate the number of genuine downloads made during a 17-week period. They also looked at official US CD sales data. Factors such as network congestion, song length - ie. download duration - as well as international school and college holidays were taking into consideration. They then used statistical methods to work out whether the sale of an album declines if it is downloaded more frequently.
The result, the professors say, is that there is no such connection.
"File sharing has no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample," their report states. "Moreover, the estimates are of rather modest size when compared to the drastic reduction in sales in the music industry. At most, file sharing can explain a tiny fraction of this decline."
Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf estimate that it takes on average 5000 downloads to reduce album sales by just a single copy - and that, they say, is a worst-case scenario. On that basis, US CD sales in 2002 would have fallen by two million copies. In fact, they fell by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002.
If the professors' analysis is correct, file-sharing may have actually limited that decline. The professors' study suggests that for the top 25 per cent of albums - those with sales of 600,000 copies or more - one extra copy was sold on average for every 150 downloads. That said, downloads did tend to impact less popular albums - those with 36,000 sales or less. Overall, however, the effect is beneficial, since the music industry makes most of its money from the most popular albums.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/30 ... not_cause/
CKA Uber 
