Abstract
ABSTRACTTechnological developments have had a profound effect on modern music acquisition, allowing people to share music over the Internet for free. The research identifies the antecedents of consumers’ attitudes and intentions to acquire music from various channels. The paper reports findings of a structured questionnaire survey of university students in the United Kingdom and Greece (n = 511). Using structural equation modeling, the authors conclude that consumers’ intention to acquire music via a legal channel is influenced by idolatry (IDL), the perceived quality of music (PQM), the perceived likelihood of punishment (PLP; digital legal channel only), and their subjective norm. On the other hand, intention to acquire music via an illegal channel is influenced by the perceived benefits of piracy. The price of legitimate music was only significant for the illegal street vendor channel, whereas IDL had a positive effect on illegal downloading. Gender had moderating effects on PLP and attitude, and income‐moderated attitude and intention from P2P platforms. The findings carry important implications for academic researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.
Highlights
Recent developments have altered cultural and creative industries such as music in unexpected ways (Cho, Liu, & Ho, in press)
We address the following three research questions in this study: (1) What is the connection between music acquisition attitudes, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, and intention? (2) What is the role of perceived benefits of piracy, price of legitimate music, perceived likelihood of punishment (PLP), and IDL in shaping their music acquisition attitudes? (3) What is the moderating effect of key sociodemographic variables such as gender and income?
After performing preliminary data screening examination the validity of the construct was assessed through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA)
Summary
Recent developments have altered cultural and creative industries such as music in unexpected ways (Cho, Liu, & Ho, in press). New (legal and illegal) channels allow consumers to efficiently download digital music files (Bockstedt, Kauffman, & Riggins, 2005; Rao, 1999), giving them easy access to music at their fingertips. These changes have resulted in substantial losses for the music industry, making the way that music is consumed an increasingly important issue (Peitz & Waelbroeck, 2004). In the United Kingdom, the sharp fall in physical sales from 2010 to 2014 (44.1%) has been accompanied by an increase in Peer-to-peer file sharing has been identified as a big challenge for the music industry that tries to achieve ways to eliminate this extensive illegal downloading behavior and to direct music downloaders (or digital consumers) toward paid services
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