Does TikTok Promote or Cannibalize Music Streaming? Estimands and Identification with Heavy-Tailed Outcomes (opens in new tab)

We study how TikTok affects demand for music on paid streaming platforms. We use Universal Music Group's (UMG) global withdrawal of its catalog from TikTok as a quasi-natural experiment. Recent work using this setting reaches mixed conclusions about whether TikTok promotes or cannibalizes streaming demand. We show that these findings can be reconciled by making the estimand explicit: with heavy-tailed exposure and outcomes, common difference...