How YouTube changed the music industry. Research looks at ‘cannibalisation’
Is YouTube good or bad for the music industry? A recently published paper argues that, without the video sharing platform, music piracy would increase.
In order to settle the lively debate about whether YouTube is good or bad for the music industry overall, Google commissioned a study from RBB Economics, a specialised consultancy, focused solely on competition law matters.
The study looks at exclusive YouTube data and a survey of 6,000 users across Germany, France, Italy and the U.K. and will examine several aspects of the transformed industry in a series of papers being published over the coming weeks.
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The first paper in the series focused on ‘cannibalisation’ and answering the question: does the fact that people listen to music on YouTube mean that they don’t use other—sometimes more lucrative—sources of music?
According to a blog post by Simon Morrison, Public Policy Manager at Google, if YouTube didn’t exist, 85% of time spent on YouTube would move to lower value channels, and would result in a significant increase in piracy.
Morrison also says the study found that in the absence of YouTube, time spent listening to pirated content would increase by 29%, suggesting that people are going to YouTube instead of pirating music.
Also, according to the study, blocking music from YouTube does not lead to an increase in streams on other platforms.
“The cumulative effect of these findings is that YouTube has a market expansion effect, not a cannibalising one,” Morrison concluded.
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