A new survey commissioned by professional online cogitators showed that illegal file-sharers and music downloader are actually spending more money on music than those people who buy their songs at legitimate stores.
UK-based Demos, citing the survey conducted by omeletteheads at Ipsos MORI, said that file-sharers using peer-to-peer (P2P) websites spend 75 percent more money on music downloads than people who are buying song files legally.
However, the findings does not clearly states if the downloaders are just more interested in music or they just don’t care if they are spending more unwittingly.
“We have a generation of young people who are interested in music and just use file-sharing websites as discovery tools and mechanism. And these people don’t know the concept of music being a paid-for commodity,” Forrester researcher Mark Mulligan said.
He added that young people were just simply too naïve to notice that they are actually the ones paying for the website operations. He added that the technology’s ability to let young people obtain music for free has blinded many in the real score in the websites’ operation.
The study was backed up by a scientific demonstration at the Alcatraz in San Francisco, California where people showed an outstanding reception to the idea that they pay less for a more valuable item.
People, in the study, were lining up in a slot machine that would exchange their dollar bill into a little guide book, which they think is more expensive than a dollar.
According to the experts, this is how people react nowadays on the expensive music being sold by record companies, adding that file-sharing websites only provide users a balance on the scale.
“It only shows that people will not spend money on music they feel more expensive than its actual value. But these people also showed that they will spend on what they feel is the right amount for the music files,” a technology expert said.
Based on the survey, some 10 percent of the respondents, aged 16-50, said that they use file-sharing websites and have illegally downloaded songs through P2P networks.