The recording industry has distinguished itself by trying to actively influence the sentencing of three Australians who pleaded guilty to the country’s first criminal charges involving online p2p file sharing.

But, "the attitudes of music industry pros toward CD burning, file sharing and copying your own music CD elicited a response that ARIA [Australian Recording Indistry Association] and record companies probably don’t want to hear," says a new study, Music – The Business, Law & Technology Report, going on:

"It’s time to change the law to allow consumers to copy their own music they say!"

Conducted at the 6th AustralAsian Music Business Conference August 14-16 and compiled by IMMEDIA!, publisher of the AustralAsian Music Industry Directory, the study asked Australian music professionals’ about their use of music technology, purchases of CDs and online music, downloading and CD burning habits as well as the need for legislation changes to, "better serve music consumers".

Of the 200 people who responded anonymously to the 30 questions, 42% were musicians or songwriters, 16%
were artist or band managers, 14% music business students, 6% record company staff, 6% music media, with 14% falling in the ‘other’ category including music publishers, agents, lawyers, producers, engineers and copyright association staff.

Some of the results from music professionals’ technology use showed:

1. Of the 76% who play music through their computers-47% listen to CDs, 19% to MP3s, 10% via streaming media websites including online radio and 24% listen to all the above.
2. 77% have a CD burner, 11% use someone else’s and only 5% have never used one.
3. Even though it’s illegal in Australia, 48% burn music from their own purchased CDs, 21% from borrowed CDs, 6% from downloaded songs while 25% burn CDs from all the above.
4. In the past year, 47% burned fewer than 5 CDs, 25% 5-10 CDs, 14% 10-20 CDs, 7% 20-50 CDs, 3% 50-100 CDs & 4% of music professionals burned more than 100 or more a year.
5. Of 45% who download music, 50% take free music only, 18% pay for it, 31% do both.

Purchasing of CDs and music/DVD/vinyl ownership habits were also polled:
1. 25 % purchased 10-20 CDs this year, 24% 0-5 CDs, 21% 20-50 CDs and 4% over 100 CDs.
2. Only 14% had purchased CDs online this year. Top sites are Chaos, Amazon & HMV.
3. CD ownership was high-32% had 200-500CDs, 24% 100-200CDs, 16% owned 50-100 while 8% had collected 500-1000 and 8% admitted to owning more than 1000 CDs.
4. DVD ownership is not as high-32% had 0-5 DVDs, 25% had 10-20 and only 6% had 50+.
5. Vinyl owners numbers 68% and 24% of those had 100-500LPs, 26% less than 20 LPs.
6. Surprising result-21% sample music via P2P before buying, 33% do not.

And on the Australian copyright law:

1. 55% considered it an inequity that it’s against the law to make a copy of your own bought CDs, make a personal use compilation (CD or tape) or copying them to a digital device.
2. A whopping 81% believe the Copyright Act should be changed to allow personal copying of purchased CDs (but not other peoples borrowed or downloaded music).
3. 57% considered burning CDs stealing from artists, 29% from labels and 14% did not.
4. 48% regarded downloading free music theft from artists, 25% from labels, 27% did not.
5. Yet 54% admitted they illegally copied computer software. 26% copied games illegally."We knew that this type of survey had never been done within the industry," says Phil Tripp-Managing Partner of IMMEDIA!. "We were not convinced of the credibility or accuracy of an earlier ARIA survey on burning and downloads they did in late 2002, released in June of 2003. Even though we’re not a statistics company, we undertook this simple survey and spent quite a bit of time compiling it.

The most controversial results were, "that people within the industry are against the current copyright laws that allow copying of games and software for backups and even certain portions of DVD by consumers who bought them, yet it was a criminal act to make a copy of music-whether from a vinyl album or CD-for personal use either as a backup copy, to make a tape or compilation CD for use in a car or portable application and even transferring CDs to a computer or onto a digital playback device such as an Apple iPod.

"The results overwhelmingly confirmed that view with a vast majority believing that those people who support the music industry by buying music or owning their own albums, should have the right to transfer tunes to other playback media without breaking the law."

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2003 at 4:38 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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