March 29th 2004
More evidence that MP3 file-sharing increases the size of the market for music:
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.
Moreover, their data seemed to show that downloads could even have a slight positive effect on the sales of the top albums, the researchers said.
