دانلود رایگان مقاله "فروش" و تاثیر سرقت موسیقی در ورود هنرمند

Abstract

There is a puzzle arising from empirical analyses of the impact of music piracy that this has caused declines in music revenue without a consequential decline, and perhaps even an increase, in the entry of artists and the supply of high quality music. There have been numerous explanations posited and this paper adds a novel one: that artists are time inconsistent and hence, tend to underweight fame over fortune when making future choices; i.e., the degree to which they will ‘sell out.’ Regardless of whether selling out is anticipated or not, the puzzle is resolved. When selling out is not anticipated, future expectations of piracy are not a concern as these only impact on monetary awards that are not driving entry. When selling out is anticipated, piracy actually constrains the degree to which artists sell out, and assured of that, raises entry returns. Implications and the role of publisher contracts are also explored.

4. Conclusion

This paper has provided a distinct explanation for the seeming neutrality of piracy on music artist entry despite observed decreases in music revenue. It is based on an assumption that music artists are time inconsistent and, as a consequence, either (i) overly discount how much they will care about piracy on their future utility and choices (for naïve artists) or (ii) see piracy as constraining poor choices their future selves might make (for sophisticated artists). Either way, and including when publishers mediate those choices to some degree, the prediction of this model is that piracy will, up to a point, not harm the entry and supply of quality music and hence, will not have the welfare costs commonly associated with it. It should be emphasised that this is just a theory. There is no independent verification here that music artists are time inconsistent but an exploration of what the implications of their being that way would be. Nonetheless, it is demonstrated that time inconsistency matters in resolving the empirical puzzles in the piracy literature to date. Moreover, even if artists are time inconsistent, as emphasised earlier, there is no verification that their future selves behave in the way they do here. That behaviour relies on fortune preceding fame to a degree, which may not be an appropriate description of what occurs in reality. All that I claim is that there is some plausibility to it and that together time inconsistency along with these dynamic assumptions gives rise to a coherent mechanism for the observed phenomenon.