Delivering the Digital Goods:

Apple boasts that more than one billion songs have been purchased from its iTunes music service. That sounds like a great number—until you consider that an estimated ten million users of Internet-based peer-to-peer (p2p) networks are logged on at any one time to swap music.

How does Apple, which sells music titles for 99 cents each, compete with free music downloads on peer-to-peer networks? Do the two approaches to distributing digital content complement each other? What can the music industry, which aggressively fights p2p downloaders, learn from Apple’s experience?

Those kinds of questions attracted the research attention of Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Andres Hervas-Drane, a PhD candidate in Economics at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University. Their working paper, “Peer-to-Peer File Sharing and the Market for Digital Information Goods,” is among the first efforts to study the interactions of two entirely new and radical business models operating in the same market.

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