Pro Sound News has published an article about the latest statistics for digital music downloading by “tweens”, those children between 9 and 14. While the slant in this article is decidedly negative (it is a trade publication after all), the stats show that most kids of this age group are using paid or legal downloading sites. The stats follow my casual observations of my 13-year-old daughter (an iTunes store downloader) and her classmates (some of whom use Limewire for illegal downloading).
The bigger implication of the article is that poor parenting/lack of supervision is primarily to blame for the kids illegal activities. I wonder if there is a Mac vs. PC thing in here? I also wonder why anyone this age is allowed to be on MySpace? What would happen if a similar study was done on porn downloads by tweens?
A new report by the NPD Group, “Kids & Digital Content,” reveals that 70 percent of tweens (ages 9 through 14) are downloading digital music in an average month. While most are using pay-to-download web stores to acquire music, NPD also notes high levels of illegal P2P file sharing.
Used by nearly half of tweens who download music, iTunes is the most popular digital music store (49 percent); however, the second most popular source for digital music among this age group is the Limewire file-sharing service, which was used by 26 percent of tweens to illegally share music. MySpace, used by 16 percent, was third most popular.
Read the whole article here