US market research firm MusicWatch has published a new study based on a survey of 700 US college students, brandishing the results as proof that they may be more willing to pay for streaming music than is sometimes expected. It claims that 77% of college students “found some feature that would motivate them to pay for a premium music streaming service” compared to 46% of overall streaming users.
Among those features, though, are “if it was harder to get their music from free services, if the paid services offered more choices or if music wasn’t available from the free versions until later”. So more about removing features from the free alternatives. The survey also found that one in five college students bought a CD last year, while 25% are buying downloads. “We have this habit of generalizing about college students, assuming they are at the bleeding edge of every entertainment technology,” said MusicWatch’s Russ Crupnick. “In fact, college students are a diverse population, and many embrace old-fashioned values related to music ownership or listening to CDs.”
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