Fractional Ownership and Copyright Licensing: Evidence from the Music Industry
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.
Alberto Galasso
Alberto Galasso is a Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto, where he holds the Anthony S. Fell Chair in New Technologies and Commercialization. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).
He serves as co-editor for the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, as associate editor for the Journal of Industrial Economics and the International Journal of Industrial Organization, and as member of the editorial board for the Strategic Management Journal.
His research agenda focuses on the determinants of innovative activity, the management of innovation and the functioning of markets for technology.
Alberto Galasso | Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto