Music sales falling in the Head, rising in the Tail

Chris Anderson
The Long Tail

July 04, 2006

Larry Lessig [ http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003460.shtml ] pointed me to an interesting bit of research on filesharing and the decline of music sales in Denmark, which shows that the fall in sales has been felt far more in the hits than in the niches. The work, by Claus Pedersen [ http://www.piratgruppen.org/ ], uses data from the Nordic Copyright Bureau. That means the data are not just estimates of sales declines, but actual sales. I've charted one aspect of the research, which looks at the change in sales in four sales categories, from bestsellers to the long tail:

A summary of the paper was translated by Marie Elisabeth Pade Andersen. You can read it here [ http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/danish_filesharing.pdf ].

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