
Dutch government study: net effect of P2P use is positive - crocus
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090120-dutch-government-study-net-effect-of-p2p-use-is-positive.html
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rjprins
Summary of the Executive Summary:

"The music industry is shrinking, hard copy sales are decreasing faster than
online sales are growing. Innovation of businessmodel is urgent. Income for
artists is moving towards liveconcerts, merchandise ans sponsorship. In the
future it seems impossible to run a company solely on music recordings."

"The movie industry is still growing, although rentals are in steep decline.
Future growth in Internet bandwidth may lead to decline eventually. Because of
the inherent character of movies (people tend to view them once), file sharing
may prove critical. The movie industry must not ignore this."

"The games industry is growing fast; at least in the console market. PC sales
are stagnating. File sharing is less of a threat here. Besides that, the games
industry is inherently more innovative and seeks out online solutions."

"The total market of music, film and games is relatively constant, but music
is going down while games are going up."

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ALee
"Because the consumers save much more money than the producers lose, the net
economic effects are positive. The report also reinforces the truth that
unpaid downloads do not translate into lost sales in anything close to a one-
to-one ratio."- probably most interesting part of the article

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rjprins
Note that this applies to the Dutch market only.

Here is a translation of table 5-3:

"Possible effects of downloading on the purchase of cd's, films and related
merchandise."

Positive:

1\. Downloading brings consumers in touch with content (music, films, games)
which creates (more) demand; the so-called "sampling-effect" (Shapiro & Varian
1999; Liebowitz 2006)

2\. File sharing (the technique) enables consumer to bundle their demands and
this increases their demands.

3\. Downloading increases the willingness to pay for and the demand for
concerts and related merchandise (complementary demand).

4\. Downloading increases popularity of products and creates demand with
willingness to pay. (network effect).

Neutral:

5\. Downloading supplies consumers which were unwilling to pay (would not have
payed).

6\. Downloading supplies consumers who where not met in their demands by
producers. (e.g. movies for the iPod)

Negative:

7\. Downloading replaces purchase of music, dvd's, games or theater tickets.
(substitution)

8\. Downloading delays purchase, resulting in a lower price for content.

9\. Sampling leads to loss of demand by preventing bad buys.

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anamax
It's not clear that "preventing bad buys" leads to lower music spending. How
do they know that the money that I don't spend on {insert something} because I
hear it and discover that I don't like it isn't money that I do spend on some
other music? (I'm not saying that they can't know the answer. I'm asking
whether they do know the answer.)

Preventing bad buys certainly leads to greater satisfaction with the music
purchased. The happier that I am with a product, the more that I buy. Then
again, I'm not Dutch.

