Ed Felten at Freedom to Tinker says his theory can explain the impact of filesharing on CD sales despite the seemingly disparate findings of well-publicized studies. The crux of his hypothesis is that the users of filesharing are of two types. ‘Free-riders’ are freeloaders, generally younger and morally unconflicted about downloading music as an alternative to buying CDs. ‘Samplers’ are generally older and, as Felten puts it, “highly engaged with cultural products of all sorts.” They are more ambivalent and morally conflicted about filesharing and use it to, well, sample. Felten can neatly wrap up the conclusions of studies showing that filesharing has a positive, a neutral, and a negative effect on CD sales inside his theory, but then he takes it too far and draws the unwarranted conclusion that “the net effect of filesharing on CD sales is roughly zero, because of a balance between the negative impact of the Free-riders and the positive impact of the Samplers.” Just because a theory with two groups with roughly opposite effects on CD sales accounts for so much does not mean that their effects counterbalance each other. How many fewer CDs would the ‘samplers’ have bought if they had not been filesharing? How many more would the ‘free-riders’ have bought? How many ‘samplers’ are there relative to the number of ‘free-riders’? Can an individual exhibit both freeloading and sampling behaviors? There is an interesting discussion thread in response to the article as well.