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With an abundance of products available online, many online retailers provide sales rankings to make it easier for consumers to find the best-selling products. Successfully implementing product rankings online was done a decade ago by Amazon, and more recently by Apple's App Store. However, neither market provides actual download data, a very useful statistic for both practitioners and researchers. In the past, researchers developed various strategies that allowed them to infer demand from rank data. Almost all ofthat work is based on an experiment that shifts sales or collaboration with a vendor to get actual sales data. In this research, we present an innovative method to use public data to infer the rank-demand relationship for the paid apps on Apple's iTunes App Store. We find that the top-ranked paid app for iPhone generates 150 times more downloads compared to the paid app ranked at 200. Similarly, the top paid app on iPad generates 120 times more downloads compared to the paid app ranked at 200. We conclude with a discussion on an extension of this framework to the Android platform, in-app purchases, and free apps.

Perhaps no kind of regulation is more common or less useful than mandated disclosure-requiring one party to a transaction to give the other information. It is the iTunes terms you assent to, the doctor's consent form you sign, the pile of papers you get with your mortgage. Reading the terms, the form, and the papers is supposed to equip you to choose your purchase, your treatment, and your loan well.More Than You Wanted to Knowsurveys the evidence and finds that mandated disclosure rarely works. But how could it? Who reads these disclosures? Who understands them? Who uses them to make better choices? Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl Schneider put the regulatory problem in human terms. Most people find disclosures complex, obscure, and dull. Most people make choices by stripping information away, not layering it on. Most people find they can safely ignore most disclosures and that they lack the literacy to analyze them anyway. And so many disclosures are mandated that nobody could heed them all. Nor can all this be changed by simpler forms in plainer English, since complex things cannot be made simple by better writing. Furthermore, disclosure is a lawmakers' panacea, so they keep issuing new mandates and expanding old ones, often instead of taking on the hard work of writing regulations with bite. Timely and provocative,More Than You Wanted to Knowtakes on the form of regulation we encounter daily and asks why we must encounter it at all.

Although most studies of file-sharing have concluded that file-sharing has decreased record sales, the extent of the decreased sales often seems uneven. This paper demonstrates that the results are more uniform than previously understood once a consistent metric is used to provide easy comparability across studies. This paper uses the percent of the decline in record sales that is due to file-sharing as a metric to translate the results of the literature into a common framework and then summarizes those results. What has not been previously noted is that the estimates from most studies imply that the impact of file-sharing was sufficient to have caused the entire decline in record sales that occurred from the advent of Napster up to about 2005. A smaller number of studies using post-2005 data indicate that the shift to digital formats may also have contributed to the sales decline that continued after 2005.

The influential piracy paper by Professors Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf, although mainly based on proprietary data, contained an 'important complement' to the main results, consisting of four 'quasi-experiments' using publicly available data. This replication examines all of these quasi-experiments by using identical data and statistical methods where possible, as well as sometimes extending or augmenting the data or methods. This study concludes that the quasi-experiments performed by OS each contain important errors, oversights or inconsistencies that most often, but not completely, overturn the results claimed in the original OS article.

Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culturedocuments the transition of recorded music on CDs to music as digital files on computers. More than two decades after the first digital music files began circulating in online archives and playing through new software media players, we have yet to fully internalize the cultural and aesthetic consequences of these shifts. Tracing the emergence of what Jeremy Wade Morris calls the \"digital music commodity,\"Selling Digital Music, Formatting Cultureconsiders how a conflicted assemblage of technologies, users, and industries helped reformat popular music's meanings and uses. Through case studies of five key technologies-Winamp, metadata, Napster, iTunes, and cloud computing-this book explores how music listeners gradually came to understand computers and digital files as suitable replacements for their stereos and CD. Morris connects industrial production, popular culture, technology, and commerce in a narrative involving the aesthetics of music and computers, and the labor of producers and everyday users, as well as the value that listeners make and take from digital objects and cultural goods. Above all,Selling Digital Music, Formatting Cultureis a sounding out of music's encounters with the interfaces, metadata, and algorithms of digital culture and of why the shifting form of the music commodity matters for the music and other media we love.

Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf recently responded to some of my negative assessments of their influential 2007 piracy article. In this article I analyze their responses to my assessments. Several of their responses have the appearance of being plausible if they are read without reference to my actual arguments and discussion. A careful reading of my assessments and Professors Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf's responses, however, reveals that Professors Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf generally misrepresent or ignore my arguments, while making numerous but untested factual assertions that are clearly refuted by the data, when tested. My negative assessments are only further enhanced by the weakness of their response, as well as by a new finding indicating that they mismatched by a week their download data and school vacation data, which would necessarily corrupt their key results.

This article explores the cultural consequences of music on iPhone, iPad and iPod, a context in which youth today use the same digital and online iTunes platform to download, play, store and organize music. iTunes, coupled with smartphones (either iPhones or Android phones) and the availability of other social network sites (e.g. Facebook, YouTube) constitute a set of ready-made tools for young people to connect themselves with music, which serves as a common interest for networking under the context of a new internet culture. In other words, former mass-mediated music choices are being replaced by the selective choices of peers, who can now use the available platforms and new music technologies to locate their own musical tastes. Based on systematic in-depth interviews and analysis of lists of songs provided by interviewees, the article argues for a process of iTunization—a term describing the cultural phenomenon in which youth of the same cohort store and share much the same music resources, with these resources being quite stable over time.

Podcasts are entering their second decade. However, this article does not present a chronological narrative of this history or focus groups exploring their effectiveness. Instead, this paper probes the enlivening capacity of podcasting when inserted into the much wider discourse of sonic media. My research probes the impact on teaching and learning when cutting away four of our five senses to focus on auditory culture, sonic media, hearing and listening. This research shows the value of ‘blind listening,’ cutting away the eyes and visual literacy, to activate more complex modes of learning.

This article compares the surge of interest in educational technology to the technology-driven transformation of business models in content-driven sectors such as music, film, and television. Focusing on how technology is influencing educational learning materials, it argues that the comparison with providers such as iTunes and Netflix is fundamentally flawed. In other content-based sectors, technology has vastly improved the value chain and user experience without fundamentally altering the content of music, film, or books. Education is different, however. Education technology must transform the very nature of the educational process. In learning, the relationship between the student and learning content must be interactive, and differentiated. The most successful emerging education technologies show how publishers can create individualized learning experiences by using technology to shape content that meets the real needs of real students.

This study examines gender differences among Greek Internet users in using digital music distribution methods. First, a Web-based questionnaire was developed and placed on most popular Greek forums. Then, 300 Greek Internet users stated their opinions regarding digital music and the following downloading methods: 1) Http downloading, 2) P2P downloading, 3) Torrent downloading, and 4) Combined iTunes method. The results revealed that P2P programs are the first choice for downloading mp3. The responders were satisfied with the P2P’s easiness of use, the variety of songs and the no need to pay. However, they worried about P2P’s safety. Gender differences were identified in several areas. Music industry managers could consider these findings in their strategies to reach the consumers. Advertising companies could use the results to target differently male or female consumers.