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”.

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:

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

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mp3s/a-blast-from-the-past-music-lovers-paying-to-play-20090819-eql2.html?skin=text-only

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