Bandwidth Day 1: Youthful Perspectives

The Bandwidth Conference kicked off in San Francisco on Thursday with the "Bellweathers" panel, where four young music consumers (19-20 years old) discussed how they discover and interact with music. While one can’t assume that they speak for all music fans their age, some interesting themes emerged from the discussion: 

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  Unsurprisingly, social networks and P2P play a big role in the music discovery for the panelists. But they also indicated that they discover a lot of new artists offline, especially at live shows.
• None of the panelists find or listen to much music on their mobile devices.
• Several panelists admitted to downloading a lot of free music… but they don’t actually listen to much of repeatedly, if at all.
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  All of the panelists have iPods, but none of them buy music from iTunes – they said it’s too expensive. A few said they occasionally buy CDs, and would be even more willing to buy CDs at shows where they might be able to get it signed by the artist, or find an exclusive release they couldn’t buy anywhere else.
• Although the album has been declared dead in many circles, all of the panelists said they appreciate and enjoy listening to full albums from their favorite artists.

Posted by Laurence Trifon.  More Bandwidth coverage to follow.