Piracy in Film and the Music Industry

Piracy today is one of the biggest threats to the global creative industry. Though evidence indicates that film and music industries suffer substantial losses from piracy, other views argue that piracy, especially peer-to-peer file sharing, provides consumers better access to new music and movies and promotes unknown artists, and hereby positively influences the overall business of the industry. This paper systematically reviews the influential and intellectual aspects of the literature on the continuing debate among academics around film and music piracy and its impact on the industry and the artists using bibliometric and content analysis. The analysis covers articles on piracy published between 2003 and 2023 collected from the Web of Science database. The findings reveal three dominant research clusters i.e., ‘impact on business’, ‘consumer behaviour and ethics’ and ‘intellectual property and copyright laws’. We further explore how piracy influences the film and music industry to transform between pre-digital and digital era. The research and analysis find evidence that there is a shift in power away from the leading big film and music corporations towards a revenue-sharing model, where artists and consumers can interact directly. Theoretically, the article also argues that there is no link between national culture and piracy. The article rejects Hofstedian cultural categorisation and territorialisation of piracy, culture, and society in the context of digital piracy of film and music industries.