Boing Boing points to news that a Cambridge economist has run all sorts of regression analyses and whatnot and determined that file sharing disproportionally helps smaller mainstream artists. It's pretty complicated stuff, but basically the guy has figured out that if file-swaps were decreased by a certain percentage, album sales of "median 'new' artists" also decreased. The opposite happens for "an artist of maximum popularity," who will theoretically gain a certain amount of sales if file sharing is reduced. Numbers don't lie, ya'll. Here's the link.