New academic research suggests that neither social norms nor the threat of lawsuits are enough to keep college students from illegally downloading music. The study, which appeared in the most recent issue of Cyberpsychology & Behavior, provides no answers to a music industry that is desperately seeking ways to put the brakes on file-sharing. It does suggest that such sharing doesn’t hurt the music business, though; according to the authors, “downloading intentions also had no direct relationship to either compact disc purchases or to subscriptions to online paid music services.”
“Share, Steal, or Buy? A Social Cognitive Perspective of Music Downloading” was authored by Professors Robert LaRose and Junghyun Kim (and highlighted by the superb Chronicle of Higher Education), and it examined the motivations of 134 students at a Midwestern university. All of the students had downloaded music illegally in the past, and their answers to the survey questions indicated that most intended to continue downloading in the future. It turns out not to matter whether the university or a student’s parents believe that such music downloads are wrong; these norms were simply not absorbed by the students.
Two things did affect student behavior. One was a sense of moral justification; students who believed that downloading music was an ethical behavior were likely to download more of it. That’s a fairly predictable result, but more surprising was the finding that students were more likely to download music if they believed that their classmates were downloading more than they were. As the researchers put it, “the less excessive one’s downloading was perceived to be compared to others, the more deficient was self-regulation [of downloading].” This is “keeping up with the Joneses,” college style.
It turns out that many students simply care more about downloading music than they do about rightness, wrongness, or consequences. The researchers have two theories for this, one of which is that file-sharing is more of a social phenomenon than an economic one. “That is,” say the researchers, “downloaders of free, so-called ‘pirate’ music seemed to be more motivated by the social aspect of trading and sharing music with other music enthusiasts rather than the proposition of saving money on music purchases.” This certainly seems to be the case for the students who run darknet servers for no profit, even as their school cracks down on the practice.
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College students-smollege students—I suspect that this atttitude is found among cabbies contruction workers bouncers school teacher techno hip grandmas and so on… Actually I’ve found that many high school and college age people are not as tek savy as the media leads one to believe.
I think once they get a taste of downloading free music they are unlikely to want to go back to the old way of buying…That’s more an old fashioned human nature that affects all age of people the same. So this so called “new academic research” is not really reporting anything new in my opinion.