Illegal Downloaders *Can* Drive Music Sales

A guest post by my Interpret colleague, Josh Bell who leads our music research on how illegal downloaders can actually drive music sales. Great stuff.

Interpret’s Syndicated Research Service recently released an interesting report about illegally downloading music. Rather than focusing on the illegal activity, we took a closer look at how else downloaders get their music. This isn’t the typical “let’s vilify the illegal downloaders and get them to switch to iTunes” strategy – it’s been tried with little success. Nor are we suggesting more lawsuits, though I’m sure that would be a fascinating and controversial read. Instead, we took a look at overall music consumption – what else are these “pirates” doing to find music? Are they paying for music at all? How can we reach them and squeeze some additional revenue out of them?

TorrentFreak.com recently posted a thoughtful article about our report, but there are two points to clear up – first, we surveyed a nationally representative sample of over 9,000 respondents, then weighted the data to the US Census to project to millions. Second, the finding that “51% [of music pirates] are fine with the current price point of legal downloads” is misleading. What we state is that on an 11-point scale where 0 = completely disagree and 10 = completely agree, 49% of illegal downloaders completely agree that downloading should be cheaper than buying a CD. This doesn’t mean the rest don’t agree – in fact, 85% agree with the statement (rated it a 6 or higher).

And one tidbit from our report not mentioned in the TorrentFreak.com article – music pirates are consuming music in a multitude of ways – video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, streaming on social networking sites, etc. So even if they’re not buying CDs or paying for downloads, there are other ways to reach them that the music industry is not exploiting.

Want to read more? Let me know and for a limited time we’ll send you the report free!

Twitter fizzles at Comic-Con

Variety reports on the Social Media research we’ve done at Interpret on the effectiveness of Twitter at Comic-Con. My colleague Zack Kirchner guest blogs and has some more details on what we learned.

Despite efforts to generate interest in over 30 different movies that were featured in studio’s booths, the majority of movies featured at Comic-Con did not generate significant enough buzz on Twitter to break the barrier of .01% of total tweets. The movies that did generate significant buzz (Summit’s New Moon, Disney’s Alice in Wonderland & Tron: Legacy, Paramount’s Iron Man 2 and Sony Picture’s District 9) were central to the comic fan’s ancillary interests in fantasy and science fiction. More importantly, the movies that generated the most significant Twitter buzz had established fan bases who re-tweeted the tweets coming directly from Comic-Con attendees, allowing those movies to expand their reach virally. New trailer releases also made it easier for people on Twitter to share links online, which certainly helped Alice in Wonderland, New Moon and Tron: Legacy rise to the top.

One factor limiting the effectiveness of studio’s efforts to promote their movies was the sheer number of movies featured at Comic-Con. Comic-Con attendees were inundated with flyers, posters, buttons and other promotional efforts even before entering the convention. It’s hard for a movie to stand out in the crowd, even when that crowd is made up of rabid costumed fans who live for Comic-Con weekend.

Summit and Disney were the most effective studios at generating Twitter buzz overall. Summit’s booth was constantly surrounded with people hoping to get a glimpse of video clips released at Comic-Con, generating a large amount of buzz for both the original Twilight movie and its sequel, New Moon. Even though Disney didn’t have a large booth to showcase their movies, they gave their fan bases what they wanted with the debut of both the Alice in Wonderland and Tron: Legacy trailers.

Overall, Twitter buzz for Comic-Con is very low with no movie generating enough tweets to even account for 1% of the total tweets during a given hour of the convention. To put these numbers in perspective though, Harry Potter, another movie with an established, active fan base, generated 4X as much buzz as the #1 movie in the box office this weekend, G-Force.