Teenagers: Meter of the Critical Sales in Digital Music; P2P Becoming Outdated?

When BitTorrent hit the P2P scene it changed it for good. It brought the transfer of large media files into mainstream one could say and it became easy for anyone to share movies, music and TV shows.

Now the P2P scene is starting to have a different look again. Since BitTorrent has reached the peak of file-sharing, other ways of listening to music have developed and, according to many, are now ready to step into the shoes of P2P.

The Web has become swamped with music. So many sites and services serving up music – Pandora, MySpaceMusic, are just some examples, plus a countless number of radio stations. For many users the notion of ‘offline’ is becoming something estranged and so they rely on audio-streaming to satisfy their musical needs and save the effort of actually downloading something. And let’s not forget the iPhone radio station apps.

According to an NPD Group report, the digital music market is on a continuous descending slope: the teen demographic (age 13 to17) bought 19 percent less music in 2008 than in 2007. The same segment of customers purchased 26 percent fewer CDs, and 13 percent fewer digital songs.

It’s a well known fact that teens represent a very accurate indicator of a market direction and in this case it could alarm the music industry towards a future decrease of the interest in paid digital music.

The same report showed that teenagers using P2P networks to get music files are also dropping by 6 percent and while this is not such a worrisome decline, it might be pointing to a the shift from P2P networking to online streaming services. As expected, on the other hand, , youth getting into social networking and internet radio came to a huge growth from 34 percent in 2007 to over 50 percent in 2008.