Who is the most pirated artist in your area?

In case you missed it..

BBC Technology reporter Dave Lee's recent article discusses data collected from monitoring service Musicmetric as part of the inaugural digital music index. By monitoring the locations of BitTorrent users, the results shed light on downloading trends across the UK.

Ultimately, the data documents the overwhelming desire to illegally source recent music releases, where Lee speculates on the likely impact of broadband speeds and towns with large student populations as contributing towards the various downloading trends across UK cities.

If you click this link you will also be able to search for the most pirated artist in your area. Go on, have a look. SPOILER ALERT: In all likelihood, it will be Ed Sheeran.

The data collected is also available for use under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license and can be accessed here.

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Spotlight on predictive factors: Age

We've looked at gender.. now it's time to consider age.

And yup, you guessed it. It's those pesky youngsters who are more likely to engage in music piracy.

Honing in on just one key study, demographic factors were explored by Mishra, Akman and Yacizki (2006) where age and experience were defined as predictive factors of digital piracy.

Why might this be? Are older people merely less likely to engage in piracy as they lack computer experience? Or is there something more complicated going on?

Age as a predictor is far from a consistent finding, where the majority of studies have focussed on student populations. As such, the trend may be slightly skewed. Furthermore, not every study exploring age has come to the same conclusion. 

It does sound intuitive, where anecdotally, there are a few obvious reasons why music pirates may well be predominantly younger. You may be able to think of some new ones. 

The UK government certainly seems to be hung up on 'young people', with Lord Peter Mandelson (the then Business Secretary) stating: “The fact that young people now expect to download content for free is morally as well as economically unstable” (BBC, 2009).

What do you think?

Ask around. Do you notice any consistent age differences?

References

BBC (2009). Net pirates to be 'disconnected'. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8328820.stm 

Mishra, A., Akman, I. and Yazici, A. (2006). Software piracy amongst IT professionals in organizations. International Journal of Information Management, 26(5), 402-413.

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