YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and other websites that contain user-generated content (UGC) have become key reference points in broader debates about copyright in the digital era. UGC websites and other digital era players have created much destruction of cultural industry business models. The rise...

The music industry is facing the development of online P2P networks, direct download services and other forms of digital piracy, while at the same time the format and promotion of pre-recorded music are undergoing major transformations with the advent of MP3 and new forms of collective...

This article is the fourth in a series by this author seeking to explore the impact of the technological revolution in the music industry. The first three built the case for three propositions concerning costs, copyright, and DRM, while this article explores the question of what economic...

This paper empirically investigates relationships among markups, service quality, and product attributes across customer, Internet-retailer, and wholesaler echelons. Recent literature has documented the reality of retail price dispersion, but little is known about how retail markups, in...

In this article, I discuss the similarity between real (existing tangible) objects that one would buy and use such as books, CDs and DVDs, and their intangible counterparts found in digital form. For reasons more to do with vested interests, greed or a misapplication of intellectual property...

The emergence of the Internet may have fundamentally altered the mechanisms underlying information exchanges between sellers and end consumers. However, little attention has been given to the impact these mechanisms have on the efficiency of supply chain operations. This paper begins to address...

As a new and global communications medium, the Internet has enabled the quick and effective dissemination of digitized content. For popular and technological reasons, the music industry has become the first major content industry to face the legal issues surrounding the rapid and widespread...