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By Nicholas Miyake
80% of interviewed students indicated that they used file sharing. That spells trouble for the music industry.

Kazaa: File sharing made easy
College students and music
College students are one of the music industry's largest target audience. They throw parties where they play the latest radio hits, listen to music in their rooms and even take it with them on portable music players. Yet, “music” was conspicuously absent from the list of things that college students said they purchased online. In fact, the sales of music as a whole has been continually declining, with a 12% dip in sales in the last two years alone. Between 2001 and 2002, sales dropped 7% worldwide (Times Online).


Chart 1: Music and media sales worldwide declined 7% from 2001 to 2002. Source: Times Online

Organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) claim that this decline in sales can be attributed to people downloading music for free using illegal file sharing services. According to my survey results, they just might be right.

File sharing frequency of students
I conducted a survey of 35 college students in a freshman dormitory at Stanford University between the ages of 18 and 22 in order to investigate their computer usage and file sharing habits. 80% of the respondents indicated that they used file sharing services at least once a week. Of these file sharing users, all of the Windows users used KaZaA as their primary file sharing service, while Macintosh users overwhelmingly used LimeWire, although other clients such as Acquisition were also mentioned. Only 3 of the 35 respondents stated that they didn’t use file sharing services on a regular basis.

Chart 2: Most respondents indicated they used some form of file sharing on a regular basis.

As Chart 2 shows, most surveyed students use some kind of file sharing service. It also turns out that their file sharing habits have a noticable impact on their purchasing habits. Every survey respondent that used a file sharing service indicated that they used the service to download music, which supports claims made by the RIAA that, although they may have some legitimate uses, file sharing services are overwhelmingly used as a means to obtain copyrighted music.

More sharing, less purchasing
One of the most important findings of my survey was that all of the file sharing users indicated that the amount of music they purchased had decreased since they started to use file sharing. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being a severe decrease in purchases since using file sharing and 5 being a significant increase, the average among file sharing users was 2.2. Although some respondents claimed that they bought more music since using file sharing, on the whole, the survey indicated that file sharing had a negative effect on the sales of music. Students seemed to be aware of this themselves, but employed many tactics to justify their behaviour.