Dilmperi, A., King, T.,

From Digital Culture & Society

The article ‘Pirates of the web: The curse of illegal downloading’ (2011) by Athina Dilmperi, Tamira King and, Charles Dennis focuses on the differences between people who pirate music and actual consumers of music. It also examines attendances at live-music performances. They focus on live music as previous research has stated will contribute to the decline of paid-recorded music. The authors use age, gender and music preference to distinguish between the participants in their study. The method utilizes a questionnaire survey and regression analysis to understand which factors play the most important role in affecting respondents’ choices to buy music, illegally download music or attended live concerts.

The authors main argument relates to the fact that the music industry has been forced into digitization. However, with digitization comes loss of revenue, as it allows for people to illegally download music for free. The study wishes to understand the characteristics of someone who downloads music illegally and someone who genuinely buys music. The authors examine demographic variables including: age, gender and income, music preferences (music genres) and the way music is experienced while consumed. The authors also focus on the attendance of live music concerts. Hypotheses are tested using data gathered from a structured questionnaire survey and are answered by university students.

The authors first argument and hypothesis within the study is the idea that age affects an individual’s behavior to buy or illegally download music. They make this statement due to previous research that has examined gender and illegal music downloading. The authors believe that men are most likely to illegally download music. Next, the authors state that income will be a variable in a person’s decision to purchase or illegally download music. Lastly, they state that someone’s music preference will decide whether or not the music will be purchased or downloaded illegally. This is related to some genres of music being more expensive than others, and some being more available online. Some artists make it difficult to illegally download their music.

The strengths of this study are that the authors can provide information to the music industry. The authors findings will be able to show marketers in the music industry who they should target when promoting the purchase of online music. The findings may also be found to be beneficial to other industries that are forced to face the issue of music piracy.

A weakness of this article is that the authors only used students to collect data within their survey. They should use a wider variety of participants that will have a difference in age. The group sizes in the survey were unequal when the authors divided those who purchased music and those who illegally downloaded it, this could have had an issue on the results. Finally, the research only examined the UK, it could have focused on other countries to see the trends on a world scale.