Study: Airplay hurts sales

July 23, 2007
Drilling Down
Radio Listeners Seem to Buy Less Music
By ALEX MINDLIN

During the past month, musicians and record labels have resumed their decades-old fight to make AM and FM stations pay royalties to performers. A new group, the MusicFirst Coalition, has publicized a six-month-old study that suggests that radio play hurts record sales.

The study, written by Stan Liebowitz, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, compared record sales and music radio listening in some 100 American cities from 1998 to 2003. It found that, very roughly, an hour’s worth of radio listening per person per day, over the course of a year, corresponded with a 0.75 drop in the number of albums purchased per capita in a given city. Professor Liebowitz has proposed that people use radio listening as a substitute for buying music.

The broadcast industry has pointed to radio’s power to create top-selling songs. But Professor Liebowitz said that while radio could elevate some songs above others, its overall effect was to depress the market for albums.