Marc BOURREAU, François MOREAU, Pierre SENNELLART
october 2011
16 p.

The French music industry has been in crisis since the mid 2000s. As content digitisation increased, sales dropped. How are we to assess the impact of the production and consumption of an industry in crisis on cultural diversity? Following Andrew Stirling's approach, cultural diversity is measured according to three criteria: the variety produced and consumed, the balance of sales across different titles, and the range of albums and artists listened to. Analysis shows that the majors have lost out to both small and large independents. It also provides some insights into to the leveraging effect of online sales (the long tail theory) and into the increasing diversity of those sales made by specialist
large-scale retailers.