"Consumption of music increases dramatically with the introduction of file-sharing, but not everybody who likes to listen to music was a music customer before, so it's very important to separate the two," said Felix Oberholzer-Gee, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and one of the authors of the study....
"While some people seemed to buy less after file-sharing, more people seemed to buy more," Sinnreich said. "It was more likely to increase somebody's purchasing habits [Washington Post]
The RIAA counters:
"Countless well-respected groups and analysts, including Edison Research, Forrester, the University of Texas, among others, have all determined that illegal file-sharing has adversely impacted the sales of CDs," RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss said. [same source]
It's extremely difficult to discern what the truth is here. Since we have no reliable way of knowing the number of CD's that would have been sold if P2P didn't exist, we can't compare that number with the number that are actually being sold. Any study of the matter must therefore ultimately rest on assumptions that may or may not be true. There is simply no way around that; research results in this area simply cannot be reliable.
The random nature of the assumptions that must be made to make it possible to do "research" in this area means that different studies will inevitably come to contradictory conclusions. Ultimately, this is a case where people will probably mostly believe what they want to believe, and be able to find research supporting their beliefs.
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