Intellectual Property Strategy and the Long Tail: Evidence from the Recorded Music Industry

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Zhang, Laurina
• 署名单位: Western University (University of Western Ontario)
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2016.2562
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 24-42
• 关键词: copyright; long tail; TECHNOLOGY; intellectual property; DIGITIZATION

摘要

Digitization has impacted firm profitability in many media industries by lowering the cost of copying and sharing creative works. I examine the impact of digital rights management (DRM), a prevalent strategy used by firms in media industries to address piracy concerns, on music sales. I exploit a natural experiment, where different labels remove DRM from their entire catalogue of music at different times, to examine whether relaxing an album's sharing restrictions increases sales. Using a large sample of albums from all four major record labels, I find that removing DRM increases digital music sales by 10%, but relaxing sharing restrictions does not impact all albums equally. It increases the sales of lower-selling albums (i.e., the long tail) significantly (40%) but does not benefit top-selling albums. These results suggest that reducing search costs facilitates the discovery of niche products.