Survey on Online Music

In March, 2001, I polled thirty-four 8th grade students at Albany Middle School. My intentions were to prove that using online music does not affect how much they spend on music. I also was interested in how users and non-users felt about copyright issues, because that is the biggest challenge online music will have to overcome.

I expected to find that there was no correlation between if someone used online music and how many CDs they bought. I believed this was true because Napster, which is what most online music users use, is not an alternative to CDs for most people, so the amount of CDs one buys would be more linked to their musical interests. I also expected to find that in copyright issue questions, users would be in favor of online music.

I was right on both ends. 38% of online music users buy 0-3 CDs per year, while 36% bought 7-22 CDs per year. Non-users with split into thirds. This proved my theory that how many CD's a person buys is more related to their interests than online music. I also found that 86% of users thought peer to peer music sharing was a fair practice, which proved my theory that users thought that what they were doing was okay. But I was surprised that non-users were split into thirds on the question, (33%, 33%, 34%), because I suspected that they would have thought it was wrong. I now think that they answered this way because non-users most likely know less about online music that users. They probably were unsure about what peer to peer music sharing was.

I also was surprised to find that 41% of users and 49% of non-users had DSL internet access. Now that I think about it, it makes sense because Albany is a upper-middle class neighborhood where everyone can get DSL, but I still was quite surprised because DSL costs $39.99 per month.

One question where users and non-users differed greatly was when I asked who benefits most from online music. 74% of users said listeners, while 79% of non-users said Online Music Developers. This is most likley because for people who have not benefited from online music, they do not know if they will benefit the most because they do not use online music.

The main thing that I would do to my survey to change it would be to focus my survey on one hypothesis and explore deeper into people's reasoning. My survey tried to cover too many topics on a single page, and therefore did not give me much information to work with. I would also try to survey in Berkeley instead of Albany, because I would get a wider variety of people. Albany is not a good place to conduct a survey about people in the East Bay because it is so much different than the rest of the East Bay.

I learned from this survey that online music does not replace CDs; it only helps listeners decide what to buy. I also learned to focus on one hypothesis next time I conduct a survey.