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With the recent announcement that the Recording Industry Association of America has issued a new wave of letters to college campuses across the country, fear was stricken into the hearts of students everywhere. After all, it's been postulated by survey after survey that the majority of undergrads download, so one could assume that a lot of individuals have put themselves in harm's way. On the surface, file sharing appears to be a classic case of "everybody else is doing it, so why shouldn't I?" This may be true in a lot of ways; admittedly, it's easier to explain away your musical law-bending when you can confidently turn to the person next to you and chat it up about your favorite torrent tracker.
But dig a little deeper and the downloading phenomenon starts looking more and more like a technological sea change, one led by a new generation that's grown tired of the old way of doing things. That old way is perpetuated by the aforementioned RIAA, the much maligned grandpappy of the music scene.
The recording industry remains the only industry that continuously pursues legal action against its own consumers, which would lead one to wonder if there will be anyone left to buy its products after the dust has settled. It labels downloaders as thieves and categorizes downloading as stealing. It takes a general drop in total sales, which could potentially be attributed to anything from a declining economy to a constant rise in CD prices, and haphazardly and defiantly insists that it's due to illicit downloads (with nary a relevant statistic to back it all up).
And it uses the "struggling artist" image to front the moral battle against file sharing, despite the fact that - as a result of a brutally draconian business model - no one is responsible for starving more artists than record companies. But in spite of its shoddy logic and lack of reasoned arguments, the RIAA has successfully managed to put downloaders on the defensive through the use of sheer aggression and crafty rhetoric.
But, believe it or not, there are credible and relatively neutral individuals out there who have managed to systematically dismantle the RIAA's claims. In 2004, Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School and Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina conducted a detailed analysis of the file sharing phenomenon, which still stands as perhaps the most well-known study on the subject thus far. Over a period of time, they studied what they claim to be "a dataset containing 0.01 percent of the world's downloads" and compared this data directly to music sales records in the United States over the same period of time, in order to test the theory (put forth by record companies) that file sharing directly impacts record sales in a negative fashion.
They conducted a thorough empirical analysis using a painstakingly complex set of mathematical formulas and data - in other words, this wasn't your everyday straw poll of 20-somethings. They eliminated the problem of relying on individuals to provide anecdotal data as related to their downloading habits, something that can lead to less-than-straightforward answers. Rather than coming in with preconceived notions and hastily proving them, they dove into a monstrously large cluster of data and looked for some dots to connect.
Connect the dots they did - and then some. As a result of their study, Oberholzer and Strumpf emphatically declared that "downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero" and that their findings were "inconsistent with the claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales."
"Even in the most pessimistic specification," they state, "$5,000 are needed to displace a single sale." Furthermore, their results led them to believe that "file sharing primarily serves to increase total music consumption." In other words, if you're one of the millions who finds yourself downloading music not to completely replace your purchases, but rather to expand your horizons and discover new music (other than what's being offered by the Billboard charts), take heart. You're onto something.
Oberholzer and Strumpf aren't alone either; numerous other examples of academic studies on the subject are out there. Though few have come to equally comprehensive conclusions, there are some researchers that make claims to the contrary, viewing file sharing as a potential threat to record sales. But do a quick search through an academic database and it's plain to see that the majority of researchers have drawn conclusions that overwhelmingly paint file sharing as, at worst, a nuisance.
These recent findings are significant because they offer a direct antidote to the tactics of the RIAA, which aim to marginalize downloaders and paint them out as being on the fringes of society. There's a reason why they use words like theft and piracy. Thieves and pirates tend not to be nice people. But these aren't black market arms dealers we're talking about here - they're college students.
And while all of this may not offer much comfort to those who open their mailbox tomorrow to find a cheery greeting from the RIAA, it's certainly a start.
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