Digital consumption of cultural goods and services

The rise in popularity of digital streaming services in the music, TV and film industries has drastically altered the way in which consumers engage with content. In the music industry, services such as Spotify have gained huge popularity at the expense of CD sales and MP3 downloads. In the TV and film industries, a similar shift has been occurring, with services such as Netflix luring consumers from traditional broadcasting and pay TV. In addition, there is evidence that legal streaming has been responsible for a decline in digital piracy. This chapter introduces some basic economic tools that can be used to analyse such problems.