Tulane University’s Professor Glynn Lunney published a new paper this week which I found through this article from Torrentfreak. Both the article, and the paper itself, are fantastic and definitely worth a read. Here is a short summary of the findings by Professor Lunney.
One of the core reasons behind copyright law in the United States (at least in its initial form) was to promote progress in science. As the years rolled on, it was recognised by the courts that in order to promote progress copyright law needed to encourage the creation of new works. This theory is also implicitly applied in the realm of music.
Lunney’s research is not concerned with the link between copyright law and, but rather studies the link between piracy and the creation of new music. The end results were very interesting, although not altogether unpredictable. The study showed that the amount of music published by new artists were happening less frequently, record sales from existing artists were occurring more regularly. The amount of music published by existing artists was greater than the decline in music produced from new artists; thus the aggregate amount of songs published was more than previous years.
Sources:
http://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-boosts-creation-of-hit-music-research-finds-140102/
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2372630
