Lasse Penttinen
19 Aug 2002 15:12
Many 'less official' sources have suspected that the MP3 phenomena is actually good for the music industry and now a Forrester survey backs this opinion up.
Forrester Research has surveyed a thousand music customers and concludes that MP3 downloads are good for the music business.
Twenty per cent of those surveyed - two groups Forrester describes as "music lovers and music learners" - buy 36 per cent of CDs, and these enthusiastic downloaders said MP3s had no effect on their CD purchasing.
"The idea that digital music is responsible for slump is completely false," concludes Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff.
The news will dismay the entertainment pigopolies*.
Forrester attributes the 15 per cent slump in music sales to a number of other factors. The economy is in a slump, there's much more competition from games, from DVDs - which saw an 80 per cent rise in sales - and most interestingly - from the "limited playlists" rotated by commercial US radio stations.
The Register