NMA writes that “a generation of young consumers is growing up believing that mobile content should be free”. The survey of 1,477 children between 6-13 found that:
–29% said they shared music via Bluetooth rather than paying for it. 45% of the remainder said they wanted to.
–Of the 80% of 6-13-year-olds that listened to music on the move, 30% used their mobile as the main device for doing so.
–29% used the internet on their phone once a month, 10% once a week and 7% once a day. Of those who didn’t go on the internet, 24% said it was because it was too expensive.
Surprisingly, 43% of respondents said they pay for their own mobile phone bills, which probably accounts for the claims that mobile content is too expensive…children often have a limited amount of cash to spend, and they want just about everything. That being said, quite a bit of mobile content is too expensive, and that needs to be addressed. There’s some good statistics here about what kids use phones for — a lot of video, pictures and sending those to friends. There’s also some ideas of what kids would like in the future — there’s a lot “free” requests, but there’s also a lot of indications that they want media on their phones, mini-DVDs, games and so on.
A copy of the survey results are here (PDF).
The BBC has a piece on this, claiming that children are infringing copyright without realizing they are doing anything illegal. To be honest, I find it a little difficult to believe the majority of kids don’t realize it’s against the law. There is one important paragraph here, though: “The threat of Napster and other sites was in the ability to deliver one copied song to hundreds of people almost simultaneously. Song swapping via mobile phones is currently one-to-one when using Bluetooth.” Swapping songs via Bluetooth is the same as copying cassettes, which is something kids have been doing for decades… This could be why the response of the music labels in both articles was fairly benign.
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