Young Music Consumers Are Still Buying Music

While the common conception of young music consumers may be that they would never so much as a glance at a CD or pay for a download, some recent stats suggest that young music consumers are just as apt to buy music as any other age group.

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Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0By now we’ve been conditioned to the fact that most music consumers, especially the youngest ones, have totally converted to streaming and wouldn’t even think of purchasing a download or CD. If you believe that then you’re wrong. A new report from the IFPI entitled Music Consumer Report 2017 outlines how people around the world consume music, and it found that young music consumers are just as likely to buy music as any other age group.Young people between the ages of 13 and 15 have always been a prime market for music and today is no exception. According to the report:

85% of them are streaming music – both audio and video.

79% are streaming music through video, while 68% get their music from a streaming platform. Of those, 37% subscribe to a paid tier, while 62% subscribe to a free tier.

33% of young consumers pay for their own music, while 35% where part of a family plan.

Those figures are sort of what everyone expected. The surprise came when they were asked about their music purchasing tastes.53% of them were still purchasing downloads, CDs and vinyl. This broke down to 38% downloads, 37% CDs and 19% vinyl.Another interesting fact is that 90% of paid audio streaming for all age groups is via a smartphone with the largest percentage (84%) coming from the 16 to 24 year old age group.Although the CD business is still falling like a rock, it remains as a large part of the music industry’s annual income, although streaming has finally overtaken it as the primary source. Given the above figures from the survey, it would be foolish to prematurely give up on the format (and downloading for that matter) as there’s still a market there even in young music consumers, an age group that everyone had assumed had moved past those consumption patterns. That’s not to say that these formats will disappear overnight though, as there’s still obviously at least a little life left there yet.