Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-2025
Journal Title
Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues
ISSN
1698-1359
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.
First Page
33
Last Page
83
Num Pages
51
Volume Number
22
Recommended Citation
Glynn S. Lunney Jr.,
Copyright, Incentives, and Popular Music Composition,
22
Rev. Econ. Rsch. on Copyright Issues
33
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/2356
File Type
Included in
Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons, Intellectual Property Law Commons, Law and Politics Commons, Law and Society Commons, Science and Technology Law Commons