The Impact of ICT on Industrial Music Business: A Cross Country Evidence

The penetration of internet and new technologies during the last decade has significantly influenced many industries particularly the music industry. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of information and communications technology on the income of industrial music. For this reason, we study the data on 20 countries obtained from the International Federation of Record Industry for the period 2004-2012. We first examine the statistical characteristic of the data by conducting the unit root, dependence, and heterogeneity of variance tests. We then estimate the econometric models specified using the fixed effects panel data for both macro and individual ICT indicators. Results show that music is a luxury good, and demand for music increases withhigher income. The impacts of both macro and individual ICT indicators on the income of music industry arealso negative and significant.