Poll Shows Illegal Downloading is The Norm

A recent poll shows what everyone more or less suspected anyway: the current 14-24 age group, affectionately known by surveyors as “the Myspace generation,” is swimming, wallowing and bathing in illegally downloaded music, NME reported Tuesday.

Carried out by the group British Music Rights and the University of Hertfordshire, the poll – the largest UK academy survey of its kind, they say – asked 1,100 “‘Spacers” about their downloading diet, finding nearly all music fans illegally copy the tunes. Ninety-five percent do it, in fact, and we suspect the other 5% lie about it.

Some interesting stats reflecting Shawn Fanning’s virus-like legacy:

- 90% of those polled own the white man’s mp3 box, and the average one contains 1770 tracks.
- An average of 842 of those tracks are there illegally, and drive taxis for a living.
- 58% of those polled have transferred music from a friend’s hard drive to their own, and 95% have done some sort of music copying.
- 63% use P2P networks. These are presumably the ones who will burn in hell forever.
- 80% of the illegal P2P people would be interested in a legal file-sharing service, and would pay for it – or so they say when questioned by The Man.
- 60% say that even if there was a legal file-sharing service, they would still buy CDs. We think these people will definitely end up as saints.

A popular viewpoint of all of this is that illegal downloading is a huge problem that has to be solved somehow. My personal take is that if it’s so universal, and all it’s doing is changing the way a business functions, it probably shouldn’t be illegal, and the music industry should lower their expectations of the monopoly they once had on people’s music-acquiring tendencies – but that’s just me.

If you have any ideas, say something, because the more people who speak up, the more likely the industry’s solution, whatever it ends up being, will take you into consideration.