UK Music fans are turning their backs file-sharing in favor of streaming and other ways of sharing music, especially amongst teens, according to the latest survey by The Leading Question and Music Ally of 1000 music fans:
The overall percentage of music fans file-sharing every month) has gone down since the last survey from 22% December 2007 to 17% in January 2009.
- The biggest drop in those regularly file-sharing occurred amongst 14-18 year olds. in December 2007 42% of 14-18s were file sharing at least once a month. In January 2009 this was down to just 26%.
All this is despite the fact that the percentage of music fans who have ever file-shared increased from 28% in December 2007 to 31% in January 2009.
The move to streaming – e.g. YouTube, MySpace and Spotify – is clear with the research showing that many teens (65%) are streaming music regularly. Nearly twice as many 14-18s (31%) listen to streamed music on their computer every day compared to music fans overall (18%). More fans are regularly sharing burned CDs and bluetoothing tracks to each other than file-sharing tracks.
More UK music fans are also regularly buying single track downloads (19%) than file-sharing single tracks (17%) every month, though the percentage of fans sharing albums regularly (13%) remains higher than those purchasing digital albums (10%).
The Leading Question research also shows the comparative volume of pirated tracks to legally purchased tracks has halved since their last survey. In December 2007 the ratio of tracks obtained from file-sharing compared to tracks obtained as legal purchases on an ongoing basis was 4:1. In January 2009 the ratio had narrowed to just 2:1.
