“Who needs to be saved?”, asks Paul Stepan
The online newspaper Der Standard today published a comment of Paul Stepan, assistent for Cultural Economics and Creative Industries at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and member of the board of the Forschungsgesellschaft für kulturökonomische und kulturpolitische Studien (FOKUS), in wich he claims that there is no evidence of negative consequences of file sharing on the revenue of the music business. The comment is the latest contribution to a dispute over the role of the music industry in the digital age in Austria that has been going on in Der Standard lately.
The comment of Paul Stepan addresses Franz Medwenitsch, director of the Verband der österreichischen Musikwirtschaft (IFPI Austria), who himself has been quoted two weeks ago in the Standard, basically saying: “We are not the knights, we are the knights in shining armour”.
Medwenitsch in turn had reacted to the member of the Viennese municipal council Siegi Lindenmayr, who at a discussion about music-filesharing is said to have accused the music industry of management failures that they now wanted to counterbalance by accusing the consumers.
Paul Stepan asks in his comment, if musicians or consumers actually need a saviour. Basically, he writes: “The industry needs the music - but does the music still need the industry? (…) Hence the question remains unanswered, who shall be saved here if not one’s bacon.”
Gastkommentar: Kein Beweis, dass sich Filesharing negativ auf Umsatz auswirkt - Von Paul Stepan - derstandard.at
IFPI Austria: Wir sind keine Ritter, sondern Retter - derstandard.at
SPÖ: “Filesharing ist nach wie vor weder Verbrechen noch Raub” - derstandard.at
