Average Teen’s iPod Has $800 Of Pirated Music
Jun 16th, 2008 | By James Lewin | Category: General, iPods & Portable Media PlayersAccording to a new survey, the average teenager’s iPod has about $800 of pirated music on it:
On average every iPod or digital music player contained 842 illegally copied songs. The proportion of illegally downloaded tracks rises to 61 per cent among 14 to 17-year-olds. In addition, 14 per cent of CDs (one in seven) in a young person’s collection are copied.
Illegal copying in some form is undertaken by 96 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds surveyed, falling to 89 per cent of those aged 14-17. Nearly two thirds copy CDs from friends, and similar proportions share songs by e-mail and copy all the music held on another person’s hard drive, acquiring up to 10,000 songs in one go.
The University of Hertfordshire’s stats seem high, but if the actual numbers are anywhere near these, it’s no wonder why the mainstream music industry is hurting.
The industry needs to open up to new ideas, like using podcasting as a promotional tool, and creating CD releases that are more of a tactile experience, so that there’s more value in owning the physical release.
The mainstream music industry is hurting because, instead of embracing an exciting new market for their products, they’ve spent the past 10 years fighting progress tooth-and-nail and being hostile and agressive with the consumers they expect to give them money. Given the treatment of the RIAA to their customers, its surprising that they actually are able to make any money whatsoever today… So while they bellyache about “losing” $800 of revenue on sales of music that they never would have had anyway, independent record labels are flourishing by creating interesting new music (instead of just repackinging the same crap that the big labels have been pushing for 20 years), giving people easy access to that music (by embracing online purchasing), and they aren’t encumbering the consumers use of that music (through the use of archaic DRM). If the big labels can’t see the error in their ways, then in a truly free market, they should either fix it or perish. There is no law that states that big record labels must exist at the expense of the small independent labels and consumers’ rights.