ABSTRACT
The rise of file sharing and the subsequent collapse in sales of recorded music offer a rare glimpse into a counterfactual world where copyright, for a time, was weakened. Comparing creative output before and after this exogenous shock allows us to test empirically whether incentives to copyright owners were correlated with creative output. In this article, I extend previous work on this issue from recording artists to songwriters and search for a correlation between incentives and popular music composition. In particular, I test three hypotheses. First, I test whether more incentives were associated with more or better popular musical compositions. Second, I test whether more incentives were associated with more entry by new composers into the market for writing hit songs. Third, I test whether more incentives were associated with higher productivity from those new composers. For the first time, for the modern music industry, I find a positive and statistically significant correlation between revenue and music output for one measure of popular music composition. However, the correlation is not robust and having run hundreds of regressions searching for such a positive correlation, not unexpected. Beyond this one, isolated result, regression analysis finds no correlation between incentives and entry by new hit songwriters. And regression analysis finds a statistically significant and robust correlation between more incentives and both (i) lower quality hit songs; and (ii) reduced productivity from new hit songwriters, ceteris paribus.
Lunney, Glynn S, Copyright, Incentives, and Popular Music Composition (October 1, 2025), Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues, Forthcoming; Texas A&M University School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper.
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