I quantify the effects of private-network music sharing on aggregate album sales in the BitTorrent era using a panel of US sales and private-network downloads for 2,109 albums during 2008. Exogenous shocks to the network's sharing constraints address the simultaneity problem. In theory,...

The increasing pervasiveness of the internet, broadband connections and the emergence of digital compression technologies have dramatically changed the face of digital music piracy. Digitally compressed music files are essentially a perfect public economic good, and illegal copying of these...