Bad news for streaming music services – Most students prefer to download music
By Will Park on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 4:03 PM PST In Announcements, Research
Streaming music services like Spotify seem like n0-brainer winners. You get unlimited access to a virtually unlimited catalog of music for a nominal monthly fee. How could streaming music not be a runaway success? By not catching on with the all-important youth/student demographic, that’s how.
A new survey of 10,000 university students, conducted by the University of Reading, finds that 75% of students would rather pay for songs and download music to their hard drive or music player. The survey indicates that the streaming music model, while attractive, just doesn’t give students the kind of semi-tangible goods that music downloads provide.
With more and more music stores eschewing DRM, digital-rights management, protection, it’s getting easier to take music libraries from the desktop to mobile. And, with on-board smartphone/music player memory stores hitting 32GB, storage space is fast becoming a non-issue. Is it any wonder college students prefer to own their music rather than rent it from a streaming music store? Take Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s Comes With Music, for example, that has yet to sign up 200,000 customers. Best Buy’s decision to put their Napster iPhone app on ice is starting to make more sense now.
What say you? Is streaming music something you’d pay for? Or would you rather stick to the pay-per-song model and own your music?
[Via: PRNewswire]
There’s a bit of a contradiction here…think someone’s got the wrong end of the stick
With Nokia’s Come With Music you download albums and tracks and you get to keep them, they belong to you – surely that should be an example of a download service that students would prefer over streaming services?
Haven’t you essentially just illustrated that both music streaming services and music downloading services are struggling?
Right, it’s getting much easier to take music libraries from the desktop to mobile. In fact, you don’t have to sideload anymore. I have about 60,000 music files which is about 165GB of data stored on one of my hard drives at home. I use Didiom to stream my entire library from my computer to my phone over the air, and it costs me nothing.
Everyone loves music, but not everyone loves paying for it
there’s no only a contradiction but also a serious misunderstanding: why pay when I can listen streaming music for free? At Pandora, we7, Spotify, Finetunes or Jango (between on hundred of those similar sites) I can listen without pay (on ad-supported versions).
So I think there are not bad news for streaming music services, only to only-subscription services (like Rhapsody or Napster)