Research: Accessibility Of Music

Most teenagers nowadays are not regular listeners to radio. They might occasionally listen to it when in the car, or to find out the current top 40 chart. The main reason they do listen to it is evidently for the music, but with online sites streaming music for free, they don’t tend to bother listening to the radio, because services such as YouTube and Last FM allow them to choose the songs that want to listen to as a pose to having to listen to what the radio presenter/DJ chooses to play – they are able to provide their own playlists.


Also, teenagers are shamingly very reluctant to pay for music, with many, if not most, of them having hardly ever bought a CD. A large majority of the teenage population download music illegally from file sharing sites on the internet. Legal ways to get free music that are used by teenagers are the radio as aforementioned, TV channels (although these aren’t very popular because the music is often played at certain times, which is not always at the time the teenagers are watching), and legit websites. iTunes is extremely popular, and is the most popular legal way of obtaining music. It is used in conjuction with the iPod, however, it involves actually buying the songs, so again, more people tend to illegally obtain their music than do so in this way.


Many teenagers like to have a 'hard copy' of the song (a file that they can keep on their computer and use at will) so that they can transfer it to portable music players and share it with friends – however, with the rapidly growing usage of illegal download, purchase of CD’s is in a major state of decline. Music players such as iPod’s, mp3 players, portable cd players, mobile phones etc. are all methods that are popularly used in order for people to access music whilst they are on the move. Hard copies of songs are often bought in shops as either vinyl or CD's, which is another method of accessing music which has been around for many years.


Below are some charts that show behavioural trends in terms of accessing music (and the people who access it).

Written by Jack.