infoJustice

Authors: Kristelia Garcia, James Hicks and Justin McCrary

Abstract: Copyright provides a long term of legal excludability, ostensibly to encourage the production of new creative works. How long this term should last, and the extent to which current law aligns with the economic incentives of copyright owners, has been the subject of vigorous theoretical debate. We investigate the economic viability of content in a major creative industry—commercial music—using a novel longitudinal dataset of weekly sales and streaming counts. We find that the typical sound recording has an extremely short commercial half-life—on the order of months, rather than years or decades—but also see evidence that subscription streaming services extend the period of economic viability. Strikingly, though, we find that decay rates are sharp even for blockbuster songs, and that the patterns persist when we approximate weekly revenue. Although our results do not provide an estimate of the causal effect of copyright on incentives, they do put bounds on the problem, and suggest a misalignment between the economic realities of the music industry and the current life-plus-seventy copyright term in the United States.

Citation: Garcia, Kristelia and Hicks, James and McCrary, Justin, Copyright and Economic Viability: Evidence from the Music Industry (December 2020). Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 17.4: 696-721 (2020), U of Colorado Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 20-5, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3528564 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3528564