Why buy an album? The motivations behind recorded music purchases.

Abstract

There has been little research into the motivations behind recorded music purchases, despite recorded music sales dropping steadily in the past decade. It is thought that widespread music piracy has played a critical role in this shift. Though 39% of revenues in the recorded music industry now come from digital services, physical formats still account for over half of all global revenues (IFPI, 2014). Furthermore, research shows that while so-called second generation (on-demand services) are taking over, most people still possess a physical music collection and actively listen to digital collections (Liikanen & Aman, 2015). Of interest in the present study, is why individuals continue to buy music, given they no longer need to in order to listen to their favorite songs.The Recorded Music Industry and the Digital Revolution: A Brief OverviewThe music industry has undergone huge changes over the past decade, as a direct result of the digital revolution. In particular, practices in the distribution and promotion of recorded music have changed from conventional purchases of albums and singles in different physical formats to digital formats via the Internet.Pioneering peer-to-peer file-sharing service, Napster is largely responsible for setting digital downloads into motion, which facilitated widespread music piracy on a global scale. Released in 1999, Napster demonstrated how quickly and easily music could be uploaded and downloaded on the Internet as well as the potential for digital music distribution to be profitable. Though music piracy has existed for decades, is the digitization of recorded music that has inspired widespread copyright infringement of protected works on an unprecedented scale. The true prevalence of music piracy remains unknown (as with all crime), but conservative estimates of Internet users actively downloading copyrighted media illegally tend to cluster around one third of the global population (see Bustinza, Vendrell-Herrero, Parry, & Myrthianos, 2013). Antipiracy measures to date have largely failed, with pirates adapting well to technical and legislative changes-Higgins and Marcum (2011) explain that knowledgeable Internet users always seem to outsmart new technologies faster than they can be produced. In recent years, the most effective antipiracy measure appears to be the rise of increasingly more attractive legal alternatives to digital piracy. As the late former Apple CEO Steve Jobs stated: You'll never stop [piracy], what you can do is compete with it (quoted in Goodell, 2003). Indeed, the iPod was released soon after Napster boomed, quickly followed by the i-Tunes store. Apple remains the market leader on digital music.The emerging preference for digital music has altered how music fans consume and enjoy recorded music, where over 80 legal modes of accessing digital music now exist in the United Kingdom, in addition to illegal means. Music can now be bought on a track-by-track basis, streamed via subscription services such as Spotify or Deezer, or listened to on-demand from personal collections stored in cloud services (networked online storage of data), to name but a few options. As much as the digitization of music, increased access to the Internet along with the increased capabilities of smartphones have shaped new listening behaviors. Music listening can now meet particular needs such as aiding a workout at the gym or managing the hectic lifestyle of living in busy urban cities. The popularity of music streaming via music subscription services calls into question what now means to own music.While there has been a renewed interest in vinyl, largely thanks to the likes of Record Store Day (where artists release exclusive content), The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in 2013 reported a steady increase in global digital revenue from music annually since 2008. IFPI notes that subscription services are now a central part of the recorded music market, with 20 million paying subscribers worldwide in 2012-an increase of 44% on 2011. …