Tracking musical expenditure: August

A year ago I was inspired to embark on a year long project to monitor by monthly expenditure on music and music-related activities after hearing about a report which suggested that, instead of being the scourge of the music industry, file sharers were the customers most likely to spend more money on music than non-filesharers.  This claim was nothing to new to me - it was one I'd seen iterated time and again in various online file-sharing communities, but I was intrigued to see exactly how such a claim might be borne out when compared to my own spending habits.

This post is an attempt to tie up some loose ends and reflect upon my findings as I add up the expenditure for the final month of the year long tracking project.  Hopefully, I'll be able to offer some broader analysis of the full year in a later post.

If this is the first time you stumbled across this series of posts then there are a few baseline claims that might be worth pointing out:

• The typical file-sharer spends £77 a year on music
• Those who claim not to use file-sharing technology spend £44 per year on music
• Source: BBC

So, how did August measure up?

The total monthly spend on music and music-related activities (ie music games, musical equipment, concerts, etc) came in at a relatively high sum of £226.98 mainly due to some hardware required for a DJ gig.  Music games accounted for another lump sum of £77.32.  A much more modest total of £19.12 was spent on buying music, of which only £5.94 would have been classified as tradiational album/single content.



Overall, that brings the total spend for the last 12 months in at £1770.57 of which £206.87 was spend on albums and singles.  That's £129.87 more than the typical file-sharer spends on music in a year, and a whopping £162.87 more than is spent by those who denied they participated in file-sharing.  What does that tell us?  Well, I'm going to take a more detailed look at these figures in a future post.