Piracy and creation: the case of the music industry

In this paper we propose a model which shows that the impact of copyright infringement on music artists depends on the type of revenue that they receive (royalties from record companies, profits for self-released artists, revenues from live concerts). We then test the hypotheses derived from the model on a dataset consisting of a survey of 710 artists representative of the whole population of French professional musicians. The results are consistent with our model in so far as: (i) those artists with a recording contract who do more live performances are more tolerant of piracy; and (ii) self-released artists are less tolerant of piracy, and that their attitude is therefore closer to that of record companies.