25 November 2009 — An Update on the Demos Research
I finally had a chance to read through the research by Demos, that I mentioned below. After reading it, I'm much more convinced that Helienne Lindvall was right in her scepticism. This is not to say that the general theme - that people who download music illegally spend more on music than those who don't - is wrong, but that it's impossible to draw any credible conclusions from this survey. Here are some highlights that I noticed:
Of the 1008 people surveyed, only 74% (746) people paid for any music at all.
The survey claims that the majority of people who download music for free say that they spend more than or "about the same" as they otherwise would on music, as a result of being able to download for free. However, only 27% of them actually said that they bought more music, while 47% said that it was about the same. In other words, of the people who download music for free, the most common claim is that their spending habits are unaffected.
Only 9% of respondents said that they knowingly download music illegally. There are two problems with this figure: the first is that it's hard to believe; the second is that it makes the sample-space of illegal downloaders in this survey horribly small: 91 people.
The fact that this sample space is problematically small is revealed in some of the responses for that group. According to the survey, 46% of people who download illegally say that they do it "because they can", but an improbably large 25% say that they download music they have already paid for physical copies of. This might be a problem with the question (many people who download music would own physical copies of some of the stuff they download, after all), or it could be the sample-size. Either way, I find it hard to take at face-value the idea that 25% of people who download music for free only download that which they've paid for in some other way.