How does music as a digital service affect consumer attitude and behaviour?

Abstract

© 2016, Universia Business Review. All rights reserved. Digital technologies allow users to share files, which in some circumstances violates property rights and constitutes consumer misbehaviour. This form of behaviour, often called piracy, is cited as causing revenue loss to the creative industries. Existing empirical evidence is silent on consumer’s individual beliefs and their attitudes towards copyright infringement. A new concept dubbed the ‘Robin Hood’ tendency is developed as a quantitative measure of consumer belief that illegally copying and distributing digital resource is a legitimate form of behaviour. Analytical applications are developed which exploit a unique dataset comprising 18,000 data points for music consumers from ten countries. Results show that digital markets suffer from consumers who demonstrate the Robin Hood tendency and identifies that countries with strong institutions have fewer consumers with this attitude. Furthermore, evidence suggests that copyright law enforcement should be coupled with efforts to educate consumers as to the effect their misbehaviour has content creators.