Majority of Students Favor Downloading Music over Streaming

With the emergence and growing popularity of music streaming sites, it seems the industry has a bright future ahead or even is pointing to success. But is streaming music what everyone wants? A new survey reveals the younger generation may not feel the same way.

The survey, conducted by the University of Reading on 10,000 university students, shows that 75% of them would not pay for music streaming service or buy hard copies in stores. Instead, they would rather buy and download songs from sites such as iTunes and Amazon MP3 Store to their hard drives or MP3 players. The poll reveals that popular streaming sites like Spotify, LastFM and Pandora, where you get unlimited access to music for a nominal monthly fee, though attractive, may not be as appealing to the youth as we thought.

This is in fact not hard to understand – some people prefer music download simply because they want to "own" their music. Music streaming, like renting from a music store, does not give you the kind of semi-tangible goods that downloading provides. Besides, with storage capacity found on devices or removable memory cards reaching 32GB, people can now save numerous audio files on their smartphones and music players like never before.

To meet the growing demand for music download, a new music site called TunesPro.com, launched three months ago, has already slashed its prices to compete with iTunes.

"Currently we charge 19c per song and offer a further 10% when a whole album is purchased. We believe this will attract the younger users away from iTunes, which charge almost 6 times more than we do," said a spokesman for TunesPro.

If you are one of those who prefer these music downloading sites, other than using an additional memory card to make sure you have enough storage capacity, you may also use a USB cable to transfer music to your PC. To enjoy them on your handset on the go, handsfrees, Bluetooth headsets or headphones are indispensable accessories you don’t want to miss.

Tags: Memory Card, MicroSD (TransFlash) Memory Card, Bluetooth, Cellular Handsfree, Data Cables, MP3 / Apple Ipod Accessory