Piracy might be painless

Two college professors made a shocking discovery: online downloads have no effect on CD sales, the Boston Globe reports.

What makes this study interesting is the methodology employed by researchers Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf:

Most studies of music downloading have surveyed people who use file-swapping services, asking them whether they buy copies of the recordings they download. But Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf feared that some people wouldn't provide honest answers and claim that they bought recordings when they didn't.

So in the fall of 2002, Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf got permission to plug into two ''supernode" servers on the file-swapping network called OpenNap to track the files being downloaded. Over a 17-week period, they watched users download about 1.75 million files, of which 261,000 were downloaded by Americans.

Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf also drew up a list of 680 popular CDs, in a variety of musical styles. They tracked the Nielsen SoundScan charts to measure US sales of these albums over the 17-week period, comparing this to the number of times people downloaded songs from the albums.

Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf figured that if music downloads were cutting into record sales, there would be a decline in sales of a CD whenever there was an increase in downloads from that disk. To their surprise, it didn't work that way. ''Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero," the study concluded.

So, why are CD sales falling, if piracy's not to blame? According to New Scientist, Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf suggest that a weak U.S. economy and increasing CD prices may be factors.