File sharing is taking its worst toll on smaller albums, “devastating” lower ranked titles on the Billboard Top 100, according to the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMSâ).
Management Insights, a regular feature of the journal, is a digest of important research in business, management, operations research, and management science. It appears in every issue of the monthly journal.
“The Effect of Digital Sharing Technologies on Music Markets: A Survival Analysis of Albums on Ranking Charts” is by Sudip Bhattacharjee and Ram D. Gopal, University of Connecticut; Kaveepan Lertwachara, California Polytechnic State University; James R. Marsden, University of Connecticut; and Rahul Telang, Carnegie Mellon University.
The authors completed rigorous empirical analysis, using data on the performance of music albums on the Billboard Top 100 charts together with data on peer-to-peer file sharing. The analysis indicates that average survival time on the chart has decreased by 42%. The lower debut ranked albums bore the brunt of decreased survival times, with file sharing as a major contributing factor.
“Although there is no evidence that file sharing hurt the top debuting albums, this electronic word-of-mouth was devastating for lower debuting albums, suggesting increased risk from rapid information sharing for all but the ‘cream of the crop,’” the authors write.
The authors note that strength of chart debut rank as a success indicator emphasizes the importance of early successful marketing efforts and suggests that firms would do well to frontload their promotional campaigns. Another important marker of success continues to be the superstar effect, with albums by these artists surviving 35% longer.
The study also provides evidence that minor labels are closing the gap with the major labels.
The authors investigated how the level of file sharing influences survival time on the charts. The first research phase compares music album survival before and after the arrival of MP3, Napster, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The second phase looks at the effect file sharing has on current top debut ranked albums and lower debut ranked albums.
The current issue of Management Insights is available at http://mansci.journal.informs.org/cgi/reprint/53/9/iv. The full papers associated with the Insights are available to Management Science subscribers. Individual papers can be purchased at http://institutions.informs.org. Additional issues of Management Insights can be accessed at http://mansci.pubs/informs/org/.
The Insights in the current issue are:
- Yahoo! for Amazon: Sentiment Extraction from Small Talk on the Web by Sanjiv R. Das and Mike Y. Chen
- Fair Payments for Efficient Allocations in Public Sector Combinational Auctions by Robert W. Day and S. Raghavan
- Should Price Increases Be Targeted" — Pricing Power and Selective vs. Across-the-board Price Increases by Aradhna Krishna, Fred M. Feinberg, and Z. John Zhang
- The Fragility of Time: Time-Insensitivity and Valuation of the Near and Far Future by Jane E.J. Ebert and Drazen Prelec
- An Integrated Model for Hybrid Securities by Sanjiv R. Das and Rangarajan K. Sundaram
- Valuing R&D Projects in a Portfolio: Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Industry by Karan Girotra, Christian Terwiesch, and Karl T. Ulrich
- Managing a Single-Product Assemble-to-Order System with Technology Innovations by Susan H. Xu and Zhoalin Li
- A Single-Product Inventory Model for Multiple Demand Classes by Hasan Arslan, Stephen C. Graves, and Thomas A. Roemer
- Ranking Contingent Monitoring Systems by Marie-Cécile Fagart and Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné
- Strategic Bid-Shading and Sequential Auctioning with Learning from Past Prices by Robert Zeithammer
INFORMS journals are strongly cited in Journal Citation Reports, an industry source. In the JCR subject category “operations research and management science,” Management Science ranked in the top 10 along with two other INFORMS journals.
The special MBA issue published by Business Week includes Management Science and two other INFORMS journals in its list of 20 top academic journals that are used to evaluate business school programs. Financial Times includes Management Science and four other INFORMS journals in its list of academic journals used to evaluate MBA programs.
About INFORMS
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) is an international scientific society with 10,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, financial engineering, and telecommunications. The INFORMS website is www.informs.org. More information about operations research is at www.scienceofbetter.org.
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