According to market research firm Ipsos, Americans are tripping over themselves to purchase music online. The company’s recent survey called TEMPO indicates that the number of paying downloaders doubled in the first half of 2003, with an estimated 10 million users forking over cash for tunes.
The TEMPO survey is a “quarterly study of digital music behavior,” which found that as of last June, around the time that the RIAA began to prosecute individual file sharers, 16 percent of “American downloaders aged 12 and older had paid a fee to download music or MP3 files off the Internet.” That number is double the eight percent of the quarter prior.
It is not surprising that young adults — those aged 18 to 24 — were more likely to pay for music, but the survey found that older downloaders — those it defines as being between 25 and 54 — were also purchasing music at a higher rate.
Macintosh users should take note that the survey’s author Matt Kleinschmit indicated that these figures are “…significant in that these data were collected in late June, prior to the recent release of multiple Windows-based online music services.”
Not coincidentally, the survey also found that MP3 player sales are up 7 percent in the same group since December 2002, which Kleinschmit concludes “suggests that digital music enthusiasts may be shifting their overall music acquisition and listening behaviors from a physical to a digital approach.”
The survey was conducted between June 27th and 30th, 2003, via a nationally representative U.S. sample of 1,112 respondents aged 12 and over. With a total sample size of 1,113, one can say with 95 percent certainty that the results are accurate to within +/- 2.94 percent.
Ipsos is a global survey-based market research firm that provides research data to member companies.
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