Response to the Harvard/North Carolina study released 29 March 2004

March 30, 2004

The international recording industry has a number of issues with both the findings and methodology of the study released today by the Harvard Business School and University of North Carolina. The most important of these are:

• all other major surveys show that file-sharing has an enormous impact on sales (by Forrester, Enders and Impact during 2002/03).
  
  
• Harvard's results are skewed because they have made the mistake of using the fourth quarter (of 2002) as a basis for some of their findings. The fourth quarter is the busiest sales period when around 40% of all sales are made. Naturally any study trying to show the relationship between file-sharing and sales needs to take a longer term view.
  
  
• research by our own national groups in five major markets (USA, Canada, Australia, Japan, Germany) shows that downloaders are twice as likely to buy less music than they are to buy more.

For more information please contact the IFPI Communications department on +44 (0)20 7878 7900 or email: info@ifpi.org.