'Playing for nothing': A commentary on musicians performing for free

Renowned Musicologist Simon Frith provides an engaging overview of the controversy surrounding musicians performing for free. Hosted on the excellent blog Live Music Exchange, Frith draws interesting parallels with recorded music and makes for a compelling argument.

Go have a peek!

And if you're a big fan of Simon, there's a conference in his honour in April of this year in Edinburgh. Details can be found here

Fear change? You are a pirate.

Confused?

Redondo and Charron's recent 2013 article 'The payment dilemma in movie and music downloads: An explanation through cognitive dissonance theory' explains all.

Novel in many ways, the research explores three groups of downloader:

1) those who NEVER pay

2) those who ALWAYS pay

3) those who SOMETIMES pay

Using some interesting measurements, they found a trend amongst the first group of downloaders to generally have a negative attitude towards newness (for example, trying new foods or products).

Arguably a counter-intuitive finding, the application of cognitive dissonance theory is niche and is ultimately responsible for informing the research findings.

Accessible via the journal 'Computers in Human Behavior', this one is well worth your time.

Tweetaulogy @musicpiracyblog 

References

Redondo, I. and Charron, J.-P. (2013). The payment dilemma in movie and music downloads: An explanation through cognitive dissonance theory. Computers in Human Behavior, 29, 2037-2046.