Music Downloading Still Favored by Students over Streaming

It’s been raining with studies lately – just last month we reported about one concerned with the shared popularity between p2p networking and video streaming. We said then that contrary to what the numbers showed and what many believed, p2p was not really “in danger” and wasn’t really losing ground over streaming.

So here’s a new study conducted by the University of Reading targeting university students, according to which most of them still prefer to download music (whether from iTunes, Amazon MP3 or p2p networks) rather than stream it or buy it directly from stores. 10,000 students participated in the survey and 75% of them said downloading songs online remains their favorite way of getting music.

Another UK survey P2PON covered last month showed that 60% of people living in the UK would buy music using online services if it was cheaper. Perhaps record industry is finally starting to catch up on the idea. MI2N gives the example of TunesPro.com, 3-month-old site offering cheaper downloads:

"We have seen a huge surge of younger people using our site as more and more of torrents and P2P files contain viruses, so our pricing must be competitive enough for the younger students with perhaps less disposable income than professionals. We keep our prices low and concentrate of making money through volume sales. Currently we charge 19c per song and offer a further 10% when a whole album is purchased. We believe this will attract the younger users away from iTunes, which charge almost 6 times more than we do," TunesPro said. Compared to iTunes which charges $1-1.29 for downloads, TunesPro.com prices its tracks starting with $0.19.

If similar sites drop the prices on their music downloads (and they’ll probably will) streaming services such as Spotify should definitely feel threatened.