Some surveys come out and my first response is the people asking the questions obviously weren’t talking to me or my friends. A perfect example of this is the latest survey by mobile entertainment company Myxer, which tells us that the CD still reigns supreme, the radio is the top source for music discovery and Pandora – the website designed to play music customized to your expressed taste – ranks second to last in how we find new tunes to add to our collections.
While the survey tries to tell us that things haven’t changed as much as we’d like to think, we believe that the scales have tipped and the end of days are near for the old guard.
According to the survey, which gathered responses on Poll Daddy from 1,049 users, 74% of respondents still buy CDs and 47% of users said that the regular old radio was still the most popular way for them to discover new music.
That television beats out social networks and Pandora is only slightly more surprising than the absence of such sources as the Web or music magazines. Where is the yearly zeitgeist The Machine or tried and true favorites like Rolling Stone and Blender?
The question on where people get their music from, however, was less surprising. While 42% said they got their music from iTunes, the category entitled “Other” came in second place with 23% and we’re willing to bet that “Other”, for many, could stand for Bit Torrents and any other number of illegal methods of acquiring music.
One explanation for this, of course, might be the demographic involved – the largest response group, 32% of respondents, was between 35 and 54 years old, while the second largest group, ages 25 to 34 came in at 23%. Or perhaps we still just run in a crowd that tends toward the fringes of music acquisition and discovery, relying on blogs, memory sticks and recommendation systems rather than morning Djs and physical media.
“While we have long known that entertainment is inherently social, making word-of-mouth and social media important avenues of discovery for new music, we were surprised to find that radio is still so relevant for discovery among those polled,” said Myk Willis, CEO of Myxer, in a release. “Social media and the mobile internet have NOT killed the radio star, not yet at least.”
On this point, we still believe, as many do, that the end is near. A recent report by analyst firm Forrester predicts that the end of the Mayan calendar may not predict the apocalypse, but rather the death of the CD in the 2012.
