Perhaps more disturbing to the country music industry is the news that 42 percent of those ardent fans who do not have home Internet access have no desire to remedy the situation.
According to a recent survey by the Country Music Association, only 50% of the 7,500 people polled had home access to the internet. So this would mean country music is not being pirated at even close to the same rate as say the “Rock” genre right? Based on this survey, Country music should be making 50% more revenue right? WRONG!
The Nielsen Sound Scan report for Country Music found album sales dropped 24% from the previous year’s numbers. To put that in context, there were more “Metal” albums sold last year than Country. Maybe pirating music was never really the issue with lackluster album sells over the last few years. Bad music and a poor economy could very well be the main reason the music industry is in such a slump. I knew it!
Or ………. is the sample size to small?
From the Washingtonpost.com :
“A 2008 survey by Nielsen Media Research found that 80 percent of all U.S. homes have a computer, and almost 92 percent of those homes have Internet access.
The 50 percent figure “was a bit of an eye-opener,” admits Tammy Genovese, CMA’s chief executive. “We know that most of our fans have access to a computer. We just didn’t realize they didn’t have it in their homes.”
“It’s dial-up, and it’s just too expensive,” says Chuck Taulbee, 39, from Stockton, Mo., who was in town for the festival, which concluded Sunday and featured performances by such superstar acts as Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley, Rascal Flatts and Taylor Swift. Like many of the people polled in the CMA survey, Taulbee lives in an area without broadband, making accessing the Internet so tedious that he’d rather do without.
In addition to lack of broadband, those surveyed cited cost and concerns over content as reasons they stayed offline. Perhaps more disturbing to the country music industry is the news that 42 percent of those ardent fans who do not have home Internet access have no desire to remedy the situation.”
So besides the fact 42 percent of the people polled have no interest in embracing technology what so ever…., I have to say this poll reaffirms my decision that the R.I.A.A. has and continues to overstep its bounds in every way, without even knowing if piracy is the real problem. Greed by label executives IS the real problem from my vantage point. Dubbing cassette tapes and burning CD’s never brought the music industry to it’s knees, so why would file sharing?
Maybe we should all be thanking those die hard country music fans, whos refusal to “get with the times”, provides some interesting data to a debate thats going to keep going for a really long time.
