The Effect of Graduated Response Anti‐Piracy Laws on Music Sales: Evidence from an Event Study in France

Abstract

Digital piracy is seen as a significant problem for the creative industries. Still, while there have been many academic studies showing that piracy hurts sales, there have been far fewer studies analyzing the effectiveness of anti-piracy measures in reversing this effect. This study attempts to address this question by analyzing how the HADOPI "three strikes" law in France affected digital music sales on the iTunes music store.To do this, we obtained a panel of iTunes sales data from the four major music labels (Universal Music, Warner Music, EMI Music and Sony Music) across a broad set of countries. We then applied a difference-in-difference approach, using sales trends in a control group of European countries to simulate the counterfactual of what music sales in France would have been if HADOPI had not been passed. Our results suggest that increased consumer awareness of HADOPI caused iTunes song and album sales to increase by 22.5% and 25% respectively relative to changes in the control group.In terms of robustness, we find that these sales changes are similar for each of the four major music labels, suggesting that our results are not peculiar to any particular label. We also find that the observed sales increase is much larger in genres that, prior to HADOPI, experienced high piracy levels (e.g., Rap and Hip Hop) than for less pirated genres (e.g., Christian music, classical, and jazz). This strengthens the causal interpretation of our results since if HADOPI is causing pirates to become legitimate purchases, its effects should be stronger for heavily pirated music than it is for other music genres.

Investigating the reaction of BitTorrent content publishers to antipiracy actions

“…Despite these challenges, a few recent studies have examined the effect of specific antipiracy actions on the behavior of a particular group of users (i.e.consumers) in a single country using measurement [1], or survey of users [2] or businesses [3]. All these studies presented a collection of evidences to illustrate that the enforcement of local antipiracy laws succeeded in reducing the downloading activity of copyrighted content among their target group of consumers.…”

“…In particular, 72% of the respondents to this survey who had received a warning, declared that they had decreased or stopped their activity, and 50% of the respondent indicated that they have increased the consumption of legal copyrighted content. The second study [3] analyzed the data from iTunes record sales by four major labels and reported 25% increase in the purchase of iTunes music among French users after the enforcement of the Hadopi law while the increase in a neighbor country such as Spain was negligible. Based on these two pieces of evidence, they concluded that the Hadopi law has been successful in deterring P2P downloads of copyrighted material.…”

“…We use two metrics to measure the effect of Megaupload closure on BitTorrent publishers as follows: (i) the average daily number of active BitTorrent publishers, and (ii) the average daily number of discovered uploaded content. Using these daily average values enables us to compare these characteristics of publishers across different datasets despite the differences in dataset durations 3 . Table II presents the average daily number of publishers and uploaded files for snapshots pb11 and pb12.…”

Research on the Digital Music Generating Model based on the Music Mapping and Visualization Technology

“…(2) Anything in real life, the occurrence and development are all real, there are some things that cause and effect is a kind of inevitable. But in the music creation, imagine whether can get rid of the shackles of reality and authenticity, it can get rid of reality to an "ideal" virtual space.…”

“…Cloud computing is known as primary global most anticipated technology revolution, and the cloud is widespread worldwide attention, because it marks, not just a new technology, or caused by technology of the industry of a transformation, will determine the competitiveness of the country. Music cloud or music cloud is not a question of concept that has become the industry investment hot spots [1][2][3][4].…”