Audio Video News

Consumers between the ages of 14 and 24 are willing to pay for downloads, says a new survey by British Music Rights. But there are conditions attached to their willingness to pay.

The last time we heard from British Music Rights, a trade organization for songwriters and music publishers, the organization had released a survey identifying copying, not downloading, as the key to declining CD sales. BMR's latest survey (PDF), again conducted by the University of Hertfordshire, finds that 80 percent of peer-to-peer file sharers would be willing to pay for legal downloads.

But they want two things that don't exist together in the same service--unlimited access and a total lack of DRM. There are, of course, unlimited-access services, but they use DRM to prohibit further access to music once the subscription has expired. And there are DRM-free downloads available from Amazon, Napster, and other services. But purchases are limited to specific albums and tracks.

Here's the question the music industry must be asking itself: If consumers were granted both unlimited access and freedom from DRM, what's to prevent someone from signing up, downloading hundreds of gigabytes, then canceling after a month? No one knows.

The new BMR survey also found, not surprisingly, that respondents had not paid for all music in their possession. However, older ones were slightly more law-abiding. Those 14 to 17 had paid for only 39 percent of the music in their collections, but among 18 to 24 year olds, the figure rose to 50 percent. Figuring in live music, which accounted for 60 percent of the average listener's budget, respondents had in fact paid for the majority of music consumed. This probably explains why at least one major label is eager to expand from recordings into concert bookings.