A longstanding economic question is the appropriate level of protection for intellectual property. The Internet has drastically lowered the cost of copying information goods and provides a natural crucible to assess the implications of reduced protection. We consider the specific case of file sharing and its effect on the legal sales of music. A dataset containing 0.01% of the world's downloads is matched to U.S. sales data for a large number of albums. To establish causality, downloads are instrumented using technical features related to file sharing, such as network congestion or song length, as well as international school holidays. Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales.

Radio stations based at universities make up only about 11 of all over-the-air stations in the United States of America, but college radio is often presented as offering an alternative in music radio to the for-profit stations that dominate the airwaves. College stations are now seen as a key means of promoting indie rock. This article traces the development of university-based radio stations in the United States, and reports on a five-year study of music programming in three stations based in Boston and New York, to examine their claim to alternativeness. The paper concludes that the stations do use different forms of music programming, that the programming extends well beyond the scope of indie rock and that the current notions of alternativeness utilised by station staff have their roots in the development of the sector from the 1920s onwards.

The new technologies of the World Wide Web have become an important arena for sound broadcasting, and for those with access there is a whole world of radio available to listen to online. The relatively small cost of making music radio programmes for online distribution has led many to argue that the technology makes the possibility of free access and diverse radio. Using empirical research and a broadly political economic analysis this paper examines recent and likely future trends to judge the degree to which the technology is adding to the public good. It concludes that two major ways of presenting streamed radio are developing, related to two business models, which are leading to the domination of this new form of radio by a small number of companies.

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This article reports on a study into the implications of the development of online fan communities for specialist music broadcasting on the domestic radio stations controlled by the United Kingdom's publically funded the British Broadcasting Company. In particular it focuses on jazz, soul reggae/urban and indie rock. The early sections explore ideas of specialist music and their role in the development of the idea of public service broadcasting within the United Kingdom. This is followed by an analysis of the activities and communities of specialist music fans online. The final section reports on the way the BBC organizes the production of radio and online media around specialist music forms. We also outline our proposals on modularization and dissemination of content, the exploitation of the taste-leadership of the stations' presenters and experts, and the possible ways in which changes in the production of programmes could serve broadcast and online media. The study concludes that the BBC places the support of specialist music as a key argument in defence of their role as a public service broadcaster, and thus for public funds, as well as demonstrating significant policy and organizational support for the implications of new online media. However, we argue that an appreciation of the place of radio and online media in specialist fan culture is not the basis for organizing production. This results in two orientations amongst staff: a broadcast one built around the centrality of the station brand and an emergent interactive one built around the potential of the new media and the BBC as a provider of public service media.