Consumption of Music

How do audiences consume their music, is it through the Highstreet, the internet, CD Players or even the radio. How do they purchase or acquire this music they listen to? This section aims to address these questions and analyses the results.

The graph above shows you the answers I gained from the question on “How they ‘acquire’ their music normally” which aimed to find out if the highstreet is truly dying out like the Media Industry fears. From the graph it appears that the highstreet has lost popularity with just being tied first with 5 out of the 12 participants in the questionnaire. This shows us that ~58% now prefer other alternatives to going to highstreet and buying their music. This step can be explained however by the fact it is far more convenient to use the internet to get your music whether illegal or by using programs such as iTunes or Spotify.

However with the options Highstreet, Internet D/L (download) and Streaming all being legal it seems the majority still prefer paying and owning their own music over illegal downloading. Out of those options it seems that the majority still using legal methods prefer owning a physical Album over the music tracks floating around in the internet ether of iTunes or Spotify.

But with just under half of the votes illegal downloading clearly shows the change in perspectives. If anything this graph shows us that the majority of people no longer own huge album collections but rather store their music on their computers or laptops. This in itself makes sense because with my demographic being of the age range 16-25 I would be greatly surprised if even 1 out of the 12 do not own a mobile phone of IPod that they use to play their music

With the massive increase in options and alternatives on how to listen to music I decided to find out what technology people use to listen to their music collection. The question asked was ‘What technology do you use to listen to music?’ to do this the question was setup as a multiple answer. My expectations were that the majority would use iPod/MP3 because of convenience. The small size and long battery life provides superb portability. Likewise I'd expect most people to use a PC/Laptop to listen to music, especially because without one you would not be able to upload your music collection to your IPods, MP3s or phones!

Furthermore due to how technology has moved forward and how MP3 players are now easily affordable I would have been greatly surprised to have found out if anyone still carried around a bulky CD player. Likewise with many mobiles phones now having a functioning music player just as capable as an MP3 player it makes sense to see a few people using this option. On top of that many IPods & mobile phones also offer radio services, but still many of us wake up in the mornings to Radio 1 as our alarm.

To conclude it is quite clear that the music industry is moving on with technology with more and more people using iPods/MP3s over the old bulkier tech. However it seems out of the legitimate options of listening to music people are still going out to stores to buy albums, but with illegal downloading having an equal amount of support it is no surprise many artists like Lily Allen detest Piracy and see it as a large challenge for the industry to face. Then again this fear may not be about the legality of it but more based on the fact that the demographic I’ve used is very similar to the audience of hers.

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