Fee-based digital music is gaining popularity among downloaders in the United States, according to market research company Ipsos-Insight.
Related story Napster debuts 'rental' service The company is putting $30 million in marketing behind a new Microsoft- backed "portable" subscription service.
About 47 percent of people who downloaded music in December and who were age 12 or older paid a fee to do so, the market researcher said. That's up from 22 percent a year ago. The study is based on data from a sample of 1,112 respondents.
Ipsos-Insight said that while users between the ages of 25 and 54 are the most likely to have paid to download music, the number of younger people paying for it is also rising.
More than half of respondents between the ages of 12 and 17 reported that they have paid for music. This indicates that efforts to promote prepayment methods among teens are proving successful, the market researcher said.
"These data reinforce how unpredictable this emerging market is," Matt Kleinschmit, author of the study, said in a statement.
"Who would have thought two years ago that the initial growth of fee-based digital music would be driven be Americans ages 25 to 54? What's even more encouraging is that we now see signs that teens are beginning to experiment with fee-based services as well, which shadows recent reports of strong sales of prepaid cards for high-profile online music download stores."
The study also noted that for the first time, the proportion of the U.S. population that's engaged in fee-based downloading is about the same as the percentage engaged in file sharing (about 11 percent).
This trend is attributed to the general rise in fee-based downloading and the gradual declines in file sharing among the U.S. population during the past two years.
All of the other sites place restrictive DRM properties on your downloaded music. Until they sell music without such annoying qualities, I won't buy from them. Just about the only music download service that sells plain mp3's is <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.mp3tunes.com/" target="_newWindow">http://www.mp3tunes.com/</a>
Their selection isn't huge but hopefully more well known artists will participate in such a great concept.
All of the other sites place restrictive DRM properties on your downloaded music. Until they sell music without such annoying qualities, I won't buy from them. Just about the only music download service that sells plain mp3's is <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.mp3tunes.com/" target="_newWindow">http://www.mp3tunes.com/</a>
Their selection isn't huge but hopefully more well known artists will participate in such a great concept.
Google creates an animated doodle that features a boy, a girl, Google's search engine, and a jump rope. But might there be darker, more analytical, more troubling interpretations to this tale?
The Silicon Valley online payments startup grew by 1,000 percent last year and is hopeful it can repeat that level of growth this year. To do that, it's had to move away from its early friends-and-family roots and embrace small businesses.
Chamtech's spray-on antenna uses a nano material to provide a low-power boost to antenna range. The wireless-in-a-can product may some day bring an end to unsightly cell towers.
EnerG2 opens a plant to make an engineered carbon that will improve performance of energy storage devices and make storage for start-stop hybrid cars less expensive.
Their selection isn't huge but hopefully more well known artists will participate in such a great concept.
Their selection isn't huge but hopefully more well known artists will participate in such a great concept.