Battleangel

A Harvard study on the effects of filesharing on album sales came to the following conclusion …

Slashdot - The Economics of P2P File-Sharing - […] it does indeed depress music sales overall. But the effect is not felt evenly. The hits at the top of the charts lose sales, but the niche artists further down the popularity curve actually benefit from file-trading. Form the paper - “Artists who are unknown, and thus most helped by file sharing, are those artists who sell relatively few albums, whereas artists who are harmed by file sharing and thus gain from its removal, the popular ones, are the artists whose sales are relatively high.” But then “File sharing is reducing the probability that any act is able to sell millions of records, and if the success of the mega-star artists is what drives the investment in new acts, it might reduce the incentive to invest in new talent.

Ah, the old incentive rationale. But that is just bogus right wing propaganda. In fact, according to this report, P2P acts as a really effective form of “socialism,” in that it not only improves the situation for the worst off, but also takes everyone else down a notch and levels the playing field. I like it. The implications are countless. For one, it would be possible to argue that the collective effort actually achieves a form of greater equality, when left without the checks and balances of the market and the elites.