Movie Performance and Recent Trends in Music and Video File-Sharing

Abstract

This issue of JME has two articles on issues related to movie performance and an article on recent trends in legal and illegal music and video file-sharing. All three papers have important implications for media firms—from record labels to movie production studios to movie theaters. All three articles are empirical in nature. They use a variety of different data sources and each article uses a different econometric strategy. The first article is “Elvis Is Returning to the Building: Understanding a Decline in Unauthorized File Sharing,” by Joost Poort and Jarst Weda. This study looks at illegal file-sharing in the Netherlands. The article relies on the self-reported downloading behavior of over 1,500 Dutch consumers, obtained via online surveys conducted in 2008 and 2012. The survey covers the consumption of legal and illegal digital media. The four-year delay between surveys allows the authors to track changes in consumer behavior over time. The data shows that illegal file-sharing of music decreased from 35% to 22% over the 4-year period. This is in contrast to a 7 percentage point increase (11% to 18%) in file-sharing of video media. What could explain this seemingly contradictory finding? The authors argue that this is due to the availability of legal digital media downloading options. In contrast to digital music—which is available from a wide variety of legal sources such as iTunes or Spotify— there were relatively few satisfactory legal sources of digital video during the sample period, according to the survey respondents. These findings are potentially important to media companies worried about the adverse effects of illegal file-sharing services, such as Pirate Bay. The results indicate that increasing the availability of legal downloading services may help diminish consumer incentives to engage in illegal file-sharing. The second article is “Superstars as Emotion-Eliciting Objects. An Examination of the Effect of the Emotion Mix of Movie Stars,” by Ana Suárez-Vázquez. This study examines the impact that superstars have on consumer decisions by focusing on the way in which a superstar can affect consumer emotions. Although many movie studies use standard box office revenue data, this study relies on a novel survey of college-aged young adults. The 320 survey respondents were asked to rate 17 movie stars based on the extent to which the stars caused students to experience the eight basic emotions of the hierarchy of consumer