Downloading and CD sales

From an article in Wired:

Researchers at two leading universities have issued a study countering the music industry’s central theme in its war on digital piracy, saying file sharing has little impact on CD sales.

“We find that file sharing has only had a limited effect on record sales,” Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf of University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill said in their report. “The economic effect is also small. Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed to displace a single album sale.”

As the article says, maybe the reason album sales are down is because the music’s lousy.