Copyright provides a long term of legal excludability, ostensibly to encourage the production of new creative works. How long this term should last, and the extent to which current law aligns with the economic incentives of copyright owners, has been the subject of vigorous theoretical debate. We investigate the economic viability of content in a major content industry—commercial music—using a novel longitudinal dataset of weekly sales and streaming counts. We find that the typical sound recording has an extremely short commercial half‐life—on the order of months, rather than years or decades—but also see evidence that subscription streaming services are extending this period of economic viability. Strikingly, though, we find that decay rates are sharp even for blockbuster songs, and that the patterns persist when we approximate weekly revenue. Although our results do not provide an estimate of the causal effect of copyright on incentives, they do put bounds on the problem, suggesting a misalignment between the economic realities of the music industry and the current life‐plus‐70 copyright term.

中文翻译：

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版权和经济可行性：音乐产业的证据

版权在法律上具有长期的排他性，表面上是为了鼓励创作新的创意作品。这个术语应持续多长时间，以及现行法律在多大程度上与版权拥有者的经济动机保持一致，一直是激烈的理论辩论的主题。我们使用每周销售和流媒体计数的新颖纵向数据集来研究主要内容行业（商业音乐）中内容的经济可行性。我们发现典型的录音具有非常短的商业半衰期-数月而不是数年或数十年的数量级-但也看到有证据表明，订阅流服务正在延长这一经济上的生存期。令人惊讶的是，尽管如此，我们发现即使是一鸣惊人的歌曲，其衰减率也很明显，并且当我们估算每周收入时，这种模式仍然存在。