Positive Impacts of Digital File Sharing Article

Positive Impacts of Digital File Sharing - Article Example With the rapid advancement and popularization of the internet, digital file sharing technology is now permeating into people’s daily life. Having noticed this trend, musicians and music retailers are now focusing on the online market leading to large changes in music culture. The virtual market has great potential: Both the accessibility and diversity of music have been greatly improved. Although online file sharing community has seemingly led to a decline in the sales of albums and the quick emergence of piracy, relative studies indicate that it does have a positive influence on the economy of the music industry as a whole, generating more revenue for music producers. While technology gives the go-ahead to distribute music all over the world with a touch of a button and makes it possible for artists to advertise on an unmatched scale it also permits music piracy anywhere, anytime. This is the unauthorized replication of goods protected under intellectual property law. This was the case when music technological advancement started back in the 1920s. Artists only got paid for sales of music purchased by radio stations but not the number of times their music got airplay. Then followed the invention of the cassette tape, which and very poor sound quality. This was followed by CDs that were largely pirated and artists got no revenue from it. The invention of file sharing and internet in the music industry increased the piracy rates, but the positive impacts that these digital platforms have brought are more than any piracy losses. Boorstin S. Eric, a lawyer graduated from Princeton University, once conducted a study about the impact of the emerging online music retail industry on total disc sales. He combined data on population characteristics with Nielson SoundScan data on CD sales for 99 metropolitan areas in the years 1998, 2000, and 2001: The total sales in music during the year 2002 were the US $32.2 billion; 41% in North America, 18.6% in Asia, 34.5% in Europe. Japan had more than 80% of the total sales in Asia, leaving Latin America and the rest of Asia and Africa to have 3.1% and 2.7% respectively.