The challenges that new technologies bring is a constant theme in copyright law, but in the field of music the problems … are particularly pronounced. Much has changed in the music industry over the past century. As new business models emerged …, incumbents in the music industry fought vigorously to capture revenue streams. As a result, the fragmented copyright rights that …

Digitization has importantly expanded the scope for reusing music in movies, a process known as music synchronization …. We use panel data on Netflix and Shazam to estimate the causal effect of music synchronization on the discovery of reused … songs. Our results show that songs are substantially more likely to be discovered via Shazam’s music recognition algorithm …