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Music Purchasing Case Study

Decent Essays

For the focus of this dissertation, an online survey was conducted to gather information on the public's music purchasing habits to gain an understanding from a public point of view of the current trends in music purchasing. 83 people took part in this survey. Firstly, people were asked how often they buy music, as fig 5 shows, 26% of people who took the survey said they do not buy music at all. These people could be streaming or downloading music illegally. Following this, the survey asked how people would usually buy their music. 35% of people said they buy physical copies of music, plus 26% said they buy physical music and digital downloads. (Fig 5: survey results for question 2) Considering it has been argued that digital …show more content…

(Fig 7: Survey results for question 5) In a interview for 'Heavy Music Artwork' in 2016, album artwork designer, Zbigniew Bielak said that “digitally enhanced album covers have increasingly fallen out of favour, illustrated cover work has undergone a welcome revival". Here, he is talking about digital media being used to create album artwork. Illustrator Dan Mumford also said in an interview for this dissertation: “Over the last decade there definitely was a slight lull where budgets got slashed and the importance of the cover became secondary to having good merchandise for people to buy.” (appendix 1) It could be argued, that these two instances are due to the same thing – digital downloading. It makes sense that with the digital age taking over the music industry that there would be less want for a digitally created cover artwork. As Mumford has mentioned, budget cuts in designing artwork were a result of the cover becoming less important, presumably because less people are buying physical albums. This considered, he also mentions that people purchase merchandise with designs on more often than albums. Following the points Mumford made in his interview, one of the questions in the public survey was tailored towards this area. When asked if they owned any merchandise such as t-shirts with album artwork on it the results were as follows in fig 8. (Fig 8: Survey

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