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Continued from previous page
A Love of Music
Waldfogel has also tackled intellectual property piracy issues, an interest born of his love of music. As he watched the
Napster era unfold, he began to wonder how music production might be affected if people stopped paying for it. Would
certain types of music stop being made?
“I wasn’t all that concerned about classical music because
I figured those guys weren’t downloading it,” he quips, noting that he personally likes traditional alternative pop and is a
self-described “Radiohead guy.”
“But I wondered just how valuable music was to people
and how much social welfare we would forgo if the music industry suffered. From an economist perspective, there was all
this area under the demand curve and I wanted to know what
would happen if all this music went away,” he says.
Waldfogel observes that most people in the music industry say with certainty that free music sharing is harmful to
them, but he points out that there is an active academic debate about this. “It’s been relatively hard to document the
harm and some prominent studies actually don’t find harm,”
he says.
In his own research on the issue, Waldfogel has found that
people who download more unpaid music tend to buy less. “I see some behavior that would be harmful to the industry,
but at the same time a lot of what is downloaded is stuff that
consumers would not otherwise have purchased. So there is
something for everyone in those findings.”
“If you look around at the number of people wearing iPods
all the time, you’d think we are at an all-time high in how useful music is to people and how much value people are getting
out of it, yet at the same time revenue to the music industry is
way down,” he says, adding that the music industry is working
on figuring out a clever solution to this discrepancy.
While his research shows both positive and negative consequences arise from music downloading, his work on free
movie viewing shows very different results. Unlike music where a person can download hundreds of songs and listen to them all day while doing other things, movies require undivided attention. So even if they are free, people still need blocks of time to enjoy them.
“Even students have limited time they could spend watching
movies, so maybe it’s not surprising that in data I’ve
gathered, people who watch one more movie without paying
watch about one less paid movie. It’s literally a one-for-one
displacement, which is a really high rate,” he says, noting
that for music, one unpaid song reduces by only a quarter the
number of paid songs, a one-for-four displacement.
And last spring, Waldfogel surveyed Penn students about
their Internet television viewing from sites like Youtube.com
as well as network-authorized websites like ABC.com to see if
people who spent more time on such sites decreased the time
they spent watching traditional television. “I found that people
who have increased web consumption across the past two
television seasons have very little in the way of decreased conventional
TV consumption, and if you consider web viewing
of network authorized sites like ABC.com, then the overall
viewing of network controlled distribution channels actually
goes up,” he says.
An explanation for the difference between outcomes for
movies and television consumption is that the Internet has
become a “giant Tivo,” says Waldfogel. “You can go to the
web any time and watch almost any TV show on your computer
any time you want. This makes it possible to watch
programming you otherwise would not have been able to
watch, then whetting your appetite to watch other episodes of
that show. Where with a movie, once I see a movie I typically
don’t want to see it again or go out and buy it. It’s plausible
that free distribution of TV shows could actually stimulate
interest in traditional TV.”
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