Why college students download music?

Downloading is an important aspect of cyberculture especially music downloads. Like the text messaging culture, downloading to me is also user generated culture. It was the prevalence of illegal downloading that led Apple to launch itunes and legalize downloading. However, that didn’t stop illegal downloading, it still continues. Despite several attempts, the music industry has yet to find a way to stop illegal downloading of music.

Downloading of content remains one of the top activities among college students. In this study, Kinnally, Lacayo, McClung & Saplosky 2008 examine the motivations of college students for downloading music. How motivations for downloading are linked to music affinity? and whether there is a relation between motivations for music downloading, music affinity and post-downloading activities such as filesharing, no. of songs downloaded, building a library of music, and CD burning.

They used the “uses and gratifications” approach and conducted a survey on around 500 students in a US university. The results of the study showed that entertainment/ pass time was the top most factor, followed by convenience/ economic utility and surveillance/ information seeking, for downloading music by college students. Other reasons were storage utility factor / ease of storing and social utility factor, that is, the downloading experience providing a topic of conversation among peers.

However, the relation between music affinity and downloading indicated that music fans download for fun, to learn about music and talk about the experience with friends. Cost and convenience are not an important factor for them. They also found that file sharing and downloading activity were not particularly related and perhaps the motives for both these activities would be very different. Males were more likely to download music, build a music library and burn CDs.

Towards the end, the researchers raise an important question that in future studies the distinction should be made between those who just download music and those who do it for participating in file-sharing networks.

I think this study once again highlights the importance of social nature of activities on internet. Although not quite like text messaging where social interaction is the primary activity or blogging which allows for exhange of ideas, downloading and sharing allows young people to participate in a cultural exchange that makes them more connected to the social world they belong.