Fractional Ownership and Copyright Licensing: Evidence from the Music Industry

El Hadi Caoui and Alberto Galasso

No 19686, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Creative content is often the product of collaboration, which may lead to fractional ownership of intellectual property. We study the effect of fractional ownership on the licensing of copyrighted material and its use in follow-on works. To do so, we compile new data on the copyright ownership structure of songs and their licensing for use in movies. We document that fractional song ownership has increased substantially: the mean number of songwriters and publishers per song has tripled between 1958 and 2021. We show that, conditional on a rich set of controls, greater fractionalization is associated with lower likelihood of licensing. We leverage the Sony-led acquisition of EMI Music Publishing in 2012 to obtain within-song variation in ownership and find that consolidating ownership rights significantly increases licensing, beyond any standalone effects of the merger.

JEL-codes: D45 L82 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-11
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