Filesharing does not influence music sales

src="http://www.cdfreaks.com/contentimages/newsimages/1379728958" align=right border=0>The
music industry complains about sales decreases and sues users of
filesharing software. Now American scientists claim to have found that
these are not necessarily responsible for this misery. Felix Oberholzer
from the Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf from the University
of North Carolina for the first time compared the number of downloaded
music files with CD sales in their study “The effect of File Sharing on
Record Sales”. They conclude that at least in statistics there is no
influence on the number of sold CDs.

The scientists observed the sales of 680 albums in the
US during a period of 17 weeks at the end of 2002. This data was
compared with activities of internet users in OpenNap. The users
downloaded 260,889 music files during this time. The scientists found out
that exchanging music files even resulted in an increase in sales, if the
titles were sold at least 600,000 times. Otherwise there was no
statistical relationship.