Aug 09
20
Economists, Statistics, Truth, Lies and Misdirection
A story on page three of the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday
(No – I didn’t buy it – Chris did….. he was on the train and likes to do the
crossword….) entitled “A blast form the Past: music lovers paying to play
quoted some interesting numbers”.
|
Digital Music |
88% |
|
Had Purchased |
62% |
|
Had Never |
9% |
|
Obtained all their |
2% |
|
Frequently |
11% |
|
Made moderate use |
15% |
|
Rarely made use of |
20% |
|
Had done it but |
13% |
|
Would buy music if |
63% |
|
Had no illegal |
9% |
The article quoted the source as being IMMEDIA and further,
it quoted the author of the report as being Phil Trip who said about the report
”The results debunked an ARIA 2003 survey.”….”Back when ARIA did it they had an
agenda”.
Phil, we agree with you. They obviously had an agenda.
Mainly because they didn’t have any digital sales outlets.
Now that their digital
sales are producing far more profit than their physical CD sales ever did,
I think they have toned down the claims somewhat.
Now I’m sure Phil is a nice bloke, but the last paragraph in
the SMH article sort of gives the game away.
Under 10% of those surveyed had used a music subscription
service (as high as that huh ? – Ed.) a figure that casts a shadow on a major labels
announcement of the ten dollar per month all you can eat plan.
(Well we at Perceptric advised certain industry members last
year that in our opinion a subscription service would fail.)
And here’s the real piece de resistance…..
“Half of those surveyed last month identified themselves as
music industry workers and 22 percent as students.”
Sometimes I hate those reporters at the SMH. They just can’t
help but put the knife in the last paragraph.
But the knife in this instance must call into question the
validity of the conclusions reached from the stats.
If as the stats say (see aqua lines) 62% of all people surveyed had used file
sharing and fifty percent of the 2240 sample group questioned, work for the
music industry – that means at least 12% of people that work for the music
industry have:
Done some or all of the following:
|
Obtained all their |
|
Frequently |
|
Made moderate use |
|
Rarely made use of |
|
Had done it but |
This would tend to support unfortunately the ARIA claim that
“File Sharing is rampant”.
Six months ago we said that 57% of Australians file share.
And then we said that it would seem that file sharing was traveling
up the demographic and leaving behind the younger generation that appeared to
be paying for their musical needs.
Unfortunately, there were no control questions in this
particular questionnaire allowing the respondents to cover their arses and
possibly give misleading or incorrect replies.
Some interesting control questions would have been:
Do you ever lend CD’s or DVD’s to friends?
Do you ever borrow CD’s or DVD’s?
Have you ever borrowed CD’s or DVD’s from your library and
ripped the contents for personal use? - (Haha Trick Question number one.)
Knowing that timeshifting (recording) TV content for
personal use is legal; Have you ever recorded Rage or MAX or V and converted it
to MP3 files?
…. The list goes on.
I think we then would have seen that the actual illegal “sharing”
of media content would have gone from 62% to over 80%.
Regardless, we really do think that a survey base where half
of the employees are music industry workers is probably not the most reliable source
to obtain survey results from – regardless of the pro/anti position in question.
The bias is obvious and unfortunately invalidates the results
of what would otherwise have been a most interesting and informative data set.
Our point is that the questions as stated above could elicit
no other response than:
The majority of people are honest and won’t download if
given a reasonable choice.
References:
SMH: A blast form the Past: music lovers paying to
play quoted some interesting numbers
In
Australia Everyone Over 25 must be using P2P.
57% of Australian internet users were file sharers.
In
Australia P2P is Big Business
57% of Australians that utilize 87% of the internet
infrastructure and bandwidth in this country