Thieving British teens average 842 illegal tracks per iPod

Davey Winder
Thursday, 19 June 2008 02:48

Your IT - Entertainment

The amount of music piracy amongst teenagers in the UK has reached epidemic proportions judging by a new survey, with illegal downloads to iPods the main source. New figures show that the number of illegal tracks on iPods is staggering.

The British Music Rights group represents over 50,000 music creators and publishers in the UK. It's 2008 survey into the 'Music Experience and Behaviour in Young People ' was compiled with the help of the University of Hertfordshire. The totally unsurprising conclusion being that teenagers have a lot of unpaid for music on their iPods.

The largest UK academic survey of its kind, questioned young Brits to reveal that 90 percent owned a MP3 player of some sort rising. The average number of tracks on each of these being a stonking great 1770. Are you really that shocked to discover that around half of these, 842 on average, had not been paid for?

Break the figures down by age range, however, and it becomes clear that those under 17 have not paid for the majority of their music collection. In fact, 61 percent of the MP3 tracks in the 14-17 age group were unpaid for compared to just 13 percent of those aged 25 plus.

The survey also shows that 95 percent have copied music in some way, including CD to CD copying. When it comes to digital piracy 58 percent simply copy tracks from a friend's hard drive to their own. 63 percent, however, download their music from a P2P file-sharing service. Surprisingly, only 42 percent allow other users to grab tracks from their own computers in return. So perhaps file-sharing is something of a misnomer for most youngsters.

This latter figure is lower than you might expect, but probably not for the reasons you would imagine. Amazingly, less than 15 percent cited concerns over getting caught as a preventative factor in sharing their music with others. Yet more than 25 percent said that a fear of virus infection was the most important factor.

While some asked admitted to downloading a staggering 5000 illegal music tracks per month, the average was a more moderate 53. Younger teens were more likely to download more tracks each month, but 18 to 24 year olds proved to be the biggest file-sharers. Most people admitted that they downloaded illegally in order to save money. However, many also claimed to do so in order to find rare tracks or as a kind of 'try-before-you-buy' system.