Downloading youth willing to pay for good service, study concludes

This is one of the findings of a recent study into how the youth in Great Britain experience and consume music. The results show that young people interact in complex ways with digital music.

More than 60% of the participants stated to regularly use p2p-networks to share music. Of these downloaders, 83% does this weekly or even on a daily basis. The reason for most is the price. But also limited availability of certain albums with vendors and trying before buying are named as reasons for file sharing.

Even so, a large number of downloaders is willing to pay for online music, as long as they gain ownership. The conclusion that more than four of five respondents are willing to pay for digital music, provided it is an “all you can eat” download service, should fill the music industry with hope.

Paid-for streaming services are much less popular. 78% of the participants says not to be willing to pay for streaming music. Ownership is key here. Young people want to have access to their music on all their media players and need to be able to share their music easily. Almost nine out of ten respondents indicated that sharing their music is important to them. The computer plays a pivotal part in this. Over 60% of the youth listens to music on the computer on a daily basis, whereas only 15% listens to CDs every day.

The way in which young people share music is getting increasingly complex. CDs are copied on the computer, songs are shared using Bluetooth, MSN and Skype; radio, TV or Internetstreams are ripped.

CDs are still a popular medium, thanks to the extras. Booklets with songtexts and photos add considerable value in the eyes of the participants. This shows that there is a market for new digital music file formats that support these extras and that are now under development by Apple, amongst others.

Regarding copyright, technology outpaces the law. The participants indicated to know that illegal downloading is forbidden, but to do it anyway. As one of them said: “Sometimes it bothers me, but more the moral part of it, not really the legal part."

The study (PDF) was carried out by the University of Hertfordshire and consisted of an online survey. Over 1800 young Britons, between 14 and 24 years of age, completed the survey. UK Music, a music industry organisation, commissioned the survey.

Interestingly, the results of this survey seem to contradict on many points a European survey by Eurostat. We reported on this study earlier. Please click here to read that post.