Wednesday, April 30, 2014

YouTube's Affect On The Music Business

If you don't think that YouTube is important to the music business, then you're not paying attention. In a new survey by Edison Research and Triton Digital, it was found that YouTube was the top source for 12 to 24 year olds to keep up to date with the latest music, even more so than radio (although that's at odds with other recent studies). Streaming service Pandora and word of mouth by family and friends are next in line.


The most surprising data item is the influence that music television channels and point-of-purchase displays in stores had, coming in at 35 and 33% (see the chart).

The rest of the population is much less influenced by YouTube than the 12-24 year olds, but still influenced all the same.

One has to wonder how much these numbers might change when YouTube introduces its streaming music channel sometime in the near future.

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1 comment:

sculley said...

I'd be very interested to know what happens with the younger generation as they get older. If most people are listening to music without "collecting" it through physical media or a digital library as previous generations did, then do they ever return to music that they used to listen to after it has come and gone from the limelight or their consciousness? I find that even in iTunes, I have "lost" the diversity of listening habits that I used to have with physical CDs. When you have a shelf full of physical media to browse through or even just have it catch your eye when you're not even looking to listen to music, it is different than scrolling through iTunes. No house guest scrolls through your iTunes library to see what your interests are. A similar analogy: I find that with eBooks, I forget that they are there, hidden away on my phone even though the app is in my face all the time. A book sitting on a coffee table says "You're reading me." An app says, "Here's where the books are." A book on a coffee table can potentially stimulate conversation. An app cannot. I've observed that as most people grow up, get jobs, have families, their interest in music wanes and becomes little more than "what's playing on the radio." They aren't "into" music in the same way that I suspect most people that read this blog are. They don't revisit a record that they loved at some point in their past. I guess that it feels like the history of it all is being lost and everything is for the fleeting moment, for better or worse. But then, music is also more about just recorded music. Just some thoughts I've had.

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