Downloading Helps Musicians?
December 6th 2004
In general, would you say that free downloading on the Internet has helped your career as a musician, hurt your career, or not really made any difference? Based on musicians/songwriters [N=2,755]
(%)
35 Free downloading has helped my career
5 Free downloading has hurt my career
37 Free downloading has not really made any difference in my career
8 Free downloading has both helped and hurt my career
15 Don?t know
From the PEW Internet Life survey of Musicians and Songwriters [Big PDF], December 2003
My comment: Musicians say it doesn’t hurt their career, it actually helps it… gee, I wonder why the Recording Industry hates downloaders…
My other comment: I’ve spent more money on music over the last year than I ever have in my life, and it was all because I could download albums and listen to different related artists and genres without buying a bunch of CDs that I wouldn’t even know if I like. If the recording industry wants me to stop downloading music, then they’ll have to deal with the side effect — I won’t buy any more music.
They should make CD’s audiophile quality so you want to purchase after you hear what would then be an inferior version over the net.
99% of the world doesn’t care about audio quality, especially when you’re talking about people who would consider downloading music.