Since Napster took the internet by storm mere months before the world discovered the Y2K bug was nothing to fear, online music sharing has outgrown its enthusiast beginnings and blossomed into a mainstream business.
No longer relegated to the hard drives of impoverished college students and CD burners, legal applications embracing the technology - while maintaining a price structure - sprung up. Even Napster, formerly a liability to the RIAA and one Metallica itself tackled head on, ended up walking the straight and narrow: the once-free service is now owned by Best Buy and offers paid subscription plans.
Has the creation of Napster, and all the file-sharing sites spawned since, directly impacted the creation of new music by new artists?
A study conducted by Joel Waldfogel, a professor of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota and long-time researcher for the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked into the theory that un-monetizing music via file-sharing would result in fewer musicians and musical works being published. In other words, if less and less money was generated by the sale of records, the natural result would be fewer artists drawn to the business.
Waldfogel's report, titled "Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music Since Napster," concluded that there was "no evidence that changes since Napster have affected the quantity of new recorded music or artists coming to market."
The study also goes into whether or not new artists are properly supported despite the sea change in how we consume music that Napster helped start over 10 years ago.
As TechDirt pointed out, some claims - such as the notion that piracy and file-sharing reduce the number of new artists rising through the ranks - were refuted. In fact the full report suggested the opposite: more new artists are cropping up now, and perhaps ironically a greater number of success stories originate from small, independent record labels than ever before.
