Snapshot of Listening / Buying Habits
If you look at how people are getting their music these days you see that the companies fighting for the people who pay for music are battling over an ever-smaller piece of the pie.
NPD Market Research’s annual survey of Internet users, which is some 80 percent of the population these days, found that 10 percent of the music they acquired last year came from paid downloads. That is a big increase from 7 percent in 2006. But since the number of physical CDs they bought plummeted, the overall share of music they paid for fell to 42 percent from 48 percent.
Most people are getting music from their friends — either burning CDs or ripping digital files. And despite the record industry’s crackdown, there is no reduction in the number of people of peer-to-peer file sharing service.
“The number of people who do peer to peer in 2007 versus 2006 has been stable,” said Russ Crupnick, who runs NPD’s music service. “The number of files taken per users has increased significantly.” This is because of the shift of many users from Limewire to BitTorrent, which makes it easier to download whole albums.
Quite surprising is the continued strength of AM/FM radio. People listen to music on the radio more times per week than any other method. Listening to music on a computer has the third largest number of people, followed by listening on a portable device like an iPod.
The music labels will look at this data and say, “If we just stick with the CD and the Apple model we are in deeper trouble,” Mr. Crupnick said. Yes indeed.
Read more from the New York Times.
Some things will never change:
1. Friends, girlfriends, boyfriends and relatives are always the best source for music (it would be interesting to find out how many of our favourite bands we found from a different source)
2. The car is an excellent place to listen to music (nobody is killing the radio star)
I would love to see a further demographic breakdown. Specifically the amount 35-54s who are downloading music for free and the % who still use radio as their primary musc source. I work with adult oriented artists and I have found that the majority of people in this demo is still not tech-savvy enough to use P2P downloading and they still default to radio. Sad since adult oriented formats have completely jettisoned current music.
Thanks for article. Keep up sharing.
You have done not a good job