Related link: http://tb.news.com/tb.cgi/2100-1027_3-5735493
Market research firm NPD Group says iTunes ranks second on its list of the top 10 most popular digital music services. Paid services Napster and RealNetworks' RealPlayer store also made the list. A summary of the study is at npd.com.
For paid music services to succeed, free doesn't have to be impossible, just inconvenient. iTunes is super-convenient and so feels like a better value than free for its users. But does the value proposition work across generations? The NPD study notes that most users of paid services are over 30. It's believed that they fear litigation more, and that they value their time too highly to spend it searching for free music files. Presumably it was similar considerations that stopped most adults from wasting time dubbing their video cassettes for their friends.
Young people are technically savvy enough to scout out the latest ways to beat digital rights management systems, and are willing to invest the time doing so. It looks likely that there will always be ways to beat DRM, so possibly the youth demographic is largely lost to the paid world going forward. It's also possible though that as each youth cohort ages, it too will adjust its priorities, and will start paying for music.
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Read More Entries by Spencer Critchley.
so what si DRM for ?
It aims to restrain young people from having the music that they don't have the money to pay for anyway. When I was young, I had this wall of tapes and 3 records, now I have this wall of cds and I am threatened to become overwhelmed by prohibitive technologies. It just does not make any sense.
scale
Even if iTunes ranks second on the list of download services overall, the piracy services combined are still an order of magnitude larger than the combined legal sources.
The higher average age of the user of legal services doesn't surprise me for all the reasons mentioned (attitude, income, taste, etc.).
While the number of individual users of legal services may not be as much different across age groups, the number of purchases by older people is bound to be higher because they have the income to purchase those payments and tend to not spend it to as high a degree on beer and candy.
Re:
I think it’s the latter.
Teenagers have little money, a lot of time, a lot of rebellion in them, largely unrefined tastes, and little appreciation for the effort of creative work. (I’m not just being curmodgeonly, elitist, or something like that; I’m speaking from personal experience. That was me when I was a greenhorn. And I’m still developing away from there.) With age, at least some of these factors fade; some factors more so than others, and in some people more so than in others.
It’s pretty safe to say that older generations will always supply the largest fraction of paying customers.