Money for nothing?

I came across a link at 'The Brand Man' to an interesting report by Handelshøyskolen BI in Norway on downloading of music and CD sales - a consumer survey comparing CD purchases, paid and free downloads from May to November 2008.

What it shows is that young people (15-20yrs) are twice as likely to download music as the rest of us - whether free or paid for. But the really interesting statistic is that young people that donload free music use paid downloads around ten times as much as their peers that don't download.

Less marked, but still of interest is that in the rest of the population people using free downloads are buying around 10% more CDs than those that don't download. (People of all ages paying for downloaded music also buy more CDs)

People that go looking for music are interested in music.... not really rocket science. But it does highlight that by targetting people downloading music for free the music industry is most probably attacking their best customers......