Animal behaviour lights music sellers' Fire as radioplay proves hot

ARE YOU a Committed, a Convert, Comfortable, Casual or Content? This is how trade body the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (see narm.com) has broken drown and sectioned off all music buyers/listeners in a just-completed study about musical habits in the world’s biggest music market – the US.

Being a trade body, the association wanted to find out who listens to what in which age group and what motivates their musical purchases. Buy or stream? Radio or TV? YouTube or Twitter?

The Committed category makes up 10 per cent of music consumers and accounts for 46 per cent of per-capita spending on music. They’re invariably in the 18 to 35 age bracket (the mean age is 32), and they’re the ones who get excited, irritated and argumentative about today’s music. Typically they pick up info/recommendations from a panoply of sources and just hate it – really, really hate it – when the Converts, Comfortables, Casuals and Contents start intruding on their territory and co-opting their fashionable choices. In other words, your average Animal Collective fan.

Converts make up 30 per cent of all music buyers and have a mean age of 34. (They also account for 34 per cent of all the spend on music). They’re ordinary, average Joe/Jane types still chasing some teenage kicks. They’re unable to relinquish a youthful musical passion but now have other interests intruding. Converts pay for their music and are happy enough with the sources, but when something new like iTunes come along they’ll have no problem embracing it. Your typical Arcade Fire fan.

The horribly named Comfortables also make up 30 per cent of music buyers but only account for 15 per cent of the overall spend on music. They have a mean age of (OMG!) 50 and are quite hide-bound in the way they listen to and choose to discover new music. They don’t trawl The Hype Machine website on a daily basis but might pick up a copy of Q magazine if they found it lying around the squash court. It is in this category that Coldplay would do most of their business.

The Casuals have a mean age of 43 and are irrelevant in so much as they only account for 3 per cent of all sales. There would have been a time in their younger years when music really mattered, but once they turned their back on it for a few years they found it impossible to get back in. One or two album purchases a year suit them just fine. They would have bought an Eminem album when everyone was talking about him, but would never have actually listened to it.

The Contents group (average age of 55, 2 per cent of all sales) are just downright perplexed by today’s music. They neither like nor understand it and only really emerge when there’s a new Beatles reissue in the shops.

There’s a a bit of movement and overlapping between the groupings. You can be a Comfortable but also a bit Convert-curious, and you can drop down from being a Committed (if you’ve had a particularly bad run) and just become a Convert.

But the one big surprising factor that unites all these disparate groups, from the alienated to the anorak, is their common avenue of discovery: the place where they will hear something for the first time and then decide whether to buy or not. And it’s the good old wireless.

Despite all the jumping up and down about new technologies yada yada over the past few years, more than 60 per cent of all music buyers still cite radio play as their primary source of discovery. In second place is television: half of music buyers cite TV coverage of music award shows and festivals such as Glastonbury as crucial sources for their spending habits.

So, if you would just sort of forget everything that's been written about changing music behavioural patterns over the last decade (put it down to a Dallas-like dream) and start all over again.

Mixed bag

That much- discussed Lady GaGa/Susan Boyle duet may well happen sooner than we think. Too late for a Christmas No 1, though

Did I really just see a video of Gwyneth Paltrow singing Gary Glitter's Do You Want to Touch Meon Glee? Did no one tell her?