It is interesting to see a mixture of studies and publicity suggesting that file sharing encourages piracy and causes sales to fall, yet there are other studies which reveal that music downloader's buy more music. Well, the Canadian Recording Industry Association has published their own study conducted by Pollara to reveal interesting details about the impact of file sharing by carrying out a survey on those who actually use P2P file sharing services.
The
survey reveals that the main source where these people get their music from is CDs at 36.4%, followed by P2P at 32.6%, purchased downloads at 20.1%, friends at 8.8%, artist sites at 5.6% and other sources at 2.9%. So even just a survey just on those who actually use P2P services reveals that only a 1/3 of them get most of their music via P2P and a slightly higher percentage still from store-bought CDs. The percentage towards CDs goes down to 27% for those aged between 35 and 44 with P2P at around 31%, which is despite a previous CRIA study suggesting that teenagers are the main P2P users.
When it
comes to buying music as a result of P2P, the study found that 28% buy more as the result of P2P, 37% buy less and the rest are unsure. Overall, 25% never bought music as a result of hearing it via P2P and 21% of the remainder made at least 10 purchases as a result of sampling music sourced using P2P. Interestingly despite many claims that teenagers buy less, teenagers bought the most with an average of 11.6 CD/DVDs in the past 6 months, with those aged 18 to 24 buying 10.9 CD/DVDs on average. This figure falls for each higher age group. When the people who bought less were asked why, 16% gave the price as the main reason, 14% said there was nothing of interest, 13% gave a lack of time as their reason and only 10% gave P2P downloads as the reason. The remaining answers consisted of a wide variation of other reasons as quoted below. Thanks to both RTV71 and heystoopid for letting us know about the following news:
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In summary, CRIA's own research now concludes that P2P downloading constitutes less than one-third of the music on downloaders' computers, that P2P users frequently try music on P2P services before they buy, that the largest P2P downloader demographic is also the largest music buying demographic, and that reduced purchasing has little to do with the availability of music on P2P services. I've argued many of these same things, but now you don't have to take my word for it; you can take it from the record labels themselves. The full article can be read here. |
It is interesting to see that a survey of those who
download music via P2P only reveals that 10% give file sharing as their
reasoning behind buying less music. However, if we tally up the
figures for 'nothing of interest", 'collection is big enough", 'watch more TV"
and 'only buy what I like", we get a figure of about 26% kind of suggesting that
there are not many
good new releases out to keep people buying as much music as they use to. On the other hand, the 'collection is big enough" statistic may also mean that the buyers have collected pretty much all of the favourite hits they can think of and are buying less now because they can no longer think of any good hits or oldies they don't already have.
heystoopid added: You have to love those Canadians, for here is a link to another report commissioned by the CRIA, about p2p, with some very interesting findings that are the complete opposite of the current thoughts, tenets and beliefs as expressed by the existing RIAA pradagims. The report indicates, that if it was not for the p2p music file sharing the decline in popular music sales would have been far more dramatic!However on a sadder note ,check out the industries unwillingness, to allow users, to remove DRM control backdoor security trojans from critical systems over at the "Freedom To Tinker" site of Prof. Ed Felton! Warning the report does run to some 144 pages, and Michael Geist has picked up some of the relevant pages! Oh well, we live in interesting times, that's for sure!
Source: Michael Geist
