Monday, May 30, 2011

Music Consumption Survey Study: Online Streaming Takes Over Illegal Downloading

According to the "Music Consumption" survey in Kalamazoo College, which was distributed via e-mail to a randomly selected sample of 250 students from all years and 150 faculty members, where a total of 76 responded. The purpose of the study was to observe the relationship between different music consumption behaviors to amounts of money spent on different sectors of music: recorded, live, and total. A special interest was fixated on the differences between groups of people who do and do not download music illegally.

The population that is being studied imposed a significant bias on the results due to the college's restriction and penalty on illegal downloading, but the study had to be carried on that way. The information obtained from the survey included number of concerts attended in the past 6 months, ticket and transportation costs, spending on studio recorded music and merchandises, frequency of purchasing physical copies from physical and online stores, purchasing digital downloads, illegal downloading, and online streaming from various sources (Grooveshark, YouTube, Pandora, etc.). The population of the college spent averages of $119.04 (62.4%) on recorded music, $54.48 (28.6%) on live music, $17.22 (9.0%) on merchandises and attended 2.88 concerts in a year. With the average of about 20 days per month of online streaming, the Kalamazoo College population appear to consume music by this method almost five times more than the rest combined with illegal downloading coming second with a mere 3.5 days per month.

Correlations were tested for spending on live, recorded and total spending on music with frequencies of consuming music by different methods as well as demographics. The only significant correlations found were that people who spend more on recorded music also spend more on live music and vice versa. Females also appear to spend less in total on music than males. There were no apparent correlations between income and different music consumption behaviors and spending on music. Note that these results only represent the Kalamazoo College population. Results are likely to differ with populations that do not face direct monitoring of restriction policies on illegal downloading.

Other data show that at a lower price, people in Kalamazoo College are quite interested in buying more recorded music, somewhat but not that interested in buying more physical copies, very interested in attending more live concerts, and not interested in paying a monthly fee for legal downloading and streaming services.

Fun Fact - Ranking of preferred music genres in K-College:

1. \m/Rock \m/

2. Classical

3. Pop

4. Hip Hop

5. Jazz and Soul

6. World

7. Electronic Dance

8. Country

- Supanat (Chris) Wachiralappaitoon

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