Supply Responses to Digital Distribution: Recorded Music and Live Performances

This one goes in the category: That took them long enough. Someone finally took a look at the effects of P2P and other modern music trading on the market for live music. Here's the abstract:

Changes in technologies for reproducing and redistributing digital goods (e.g., music, movies, software, books) have dramatically affected profitability of these goods, and raised concerns for future development of socially valuable digital products. However, broader illegitimate distribution of digital goods may have offsetting demand implications for legitimate sales of complementary non-digital products. We examine the negative impact of file-sharing on recorded music sales and offsetting implications for live concert performances. We find that file-sharing reduces album sales but increases live performance revenues for small artists, perhaps through increased awareness. The impact on live performance revenues for large, well-known artists is negligible.

The article is Mortimer, Nosko, and Sorensen, Supply Responses to Digital Distribution: Recorded Music and Live Performances (October 2010). NBER Working Paper Series, No. w16507.

I would have expected a positive effect for bigger bands as well, but I guess you can't win 'em all.