J
Ö N K Ö P I N GI
N T E R N A T I O N A LB
U S I N E S SS
C H O O LJÖNKÖPING UNIVERSITY
A t t i t u d e s A m o n g S w e d i s h S t u d e n t s
A S t u d y o f P i r a c y a n d I l l e g a l D o w n l o a d i n g
Paper within BACHELOR THESIS IN BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION Authors: Rickard Holmgren
Sakari Ylönen Niclas Öhrn Tutor: Olga Sasinovskaya Jönköping January, 2009
Acknowledgements
First and foremost the authors would like to thank the participants of the focus group for taking their time to participate and provide useful inputs for this thesis. A sincere gratitude also goes to the respondents of the survey for their valuable contribution.
The authors would also like to thank our tutor Olga Sasinovskaya, for providing guidelines and valuable feedback throughout the writing-process of this thesis.
Further, the authors want to thank Pär Winberg at EMI Music AB for important informa-tion for the background and useful insights into the Swedish music industry today.
Finally the authors want to express gratitude toward fellow thesis groups, for contributing with ideas and constructive criticism that enabled us to carry through the thesis in the best possible way.
Rickard Holmgren Sakari Ylönen Niclas Öhrn
Jönköping International Business School
Bachelor Thesis in Business Administration
Title: Attitudes Among Swedish Students: A Study of Piracy and Illegal Down-loading
Author: Rickard Holmgren Sakari Ylönen Niclas Öhrn Tutor: Olga Sasinovskaya Date: January 2009
Subject terms: Attitudes, Piracy, Music, Consumer Behavior, Illegal Downloading, Students
Abstract
The record companies have for years suffered from reduced sales figures and one of the reasons for that is seen to be the illegal downloading of music. The birth of digital music that can be accessed online has enabled to illegally acquire music and created severe prob-lems for the record labels. Therefore, it is interesting to conduct a research on the consum-er attitudes of piracy.
This thesis purpose is to find out what are the attitudes of Swedish students towards illegal downloading.
The frame of reference consists of several theories included in consumer behavior that build the basis for the analysis section. These are the consumer buying decision process model, and concepts such as attitudes, motivation, needs, ethics, and purchase knowledge. Moreover, issues regarding e-commerce and online related issues of music are being dis-cussed.
The method part is carried out by conducting a quantitative study including 60 randomly picked students in some major cities in Sweden. This was carried out in order to obtain a general picture of the piracy problem. In addition, focus group interview with 6 Swedish students at Jönköping International Business School was conducted to go more in-depth with this issue of illegal downloading, thus discovering the reasons for it and how attitudes and opinions could have an effect on them.
The results show that practically everyone downloads music illegally, and not that many buy CDs anymore. Downloading happens on a regular basis, and it is notable how much the buying behavior within the music industry has changed in the recent years. Most popu-lar reasons for these actions were the price of CDs versus downloading for free, the con-venience, and small risk of getting caught. Furthermore, illegal downloading is not seen as stealing, at least at the same extent as stealing a physical CD.
It seems that as long as downloading is both beneficial for the students in terms of money and convenience, and it is possible to continue illegal downloading without having a realis-tic risk of getting caught, the piracy problem will continue. In addition, the weak copyright laws in Sweden support this kind of action. It seems that the students in Sweden will con-tinue to download illegally music as long as it s possible, due to the pre-learned attitudes that music should be gotten without paying for it. The upcoming IPRED-law that will ena-ble the record companies to get the file sharers’ IP addresses can have an effect on this is-sue. It is suggestible to conduct a new, similar study after the law has come into effect, to discover whether the attitudes, opinions, and the actual downloading activity have changed.
Table of Contents
Abstract ... 2
1
Introduction ... 6
1.1 Background ... 6 1.2 Problem ... 7 1.3 Purpose ... 8 1.4 Research questions ... 9 1.5 Delimitations ... 92
Frame of Reference ... 10
2.1 Previous Research ... 10 2.2 Theoretical Framework ... 112.3 The Consumer Decision Process (CDP) Model ... 11
2.3.1 Need Recognition ... 12
2.3.2 Search for Information ... 12
2.3.3 Pre-Purchase Evaluation of Alternatives ... 13
2.4 Purchase Behavior in the E-Commerce Revolution ... 13
2.5 Music Distribution, Acquirement, and Consumption over the Internet ... 14
2.6 Consumer Intentions ... 15
2.7 Types of Buying Decision Process ... 15
2.8 Market Struggle ... 16
2.9 Needs ... 16
2.10 Motivation and Values ... 17
2.11 Consuming Needs and Values: Economic Approaches to Needs ... 17
2.12 Time Budgets ... 17
2.13 Money as Votes ... 18
2.14 Attitudes ... 18
2.15 Ethical Consumer Behavior ... 19
2.16 Purchase Knowledge ... 19 2.17 Summary of Theories ... 20
3
Method ... 21
3.1 Research Design ... 21 3.2 Research Approach ... 22 3.3 Research Design ... 223.4 Data collection method ... 24
3.4.1 Secondary Data ... 24
3.4.2 Primary Data ... 24
3.4.2.1 Sampling ... 25
3.4.2.2 Questionnaires ... 26
3.4.2.3 Focus Group ... 27
3.5 Pros & Cons and Limitations with Chosen Method ... 28
3.6 Change of Purpose... 28
3.7 Analyzing Data ... 28
3.7.1 Analyzing Quantitative Data ... 28
3.7.2 Analyzing Qualitative Data ... 29
4
Empirical Findings ... 30
4.1 Question 1: Do You Buy Music? ... 30
4.3 Question 3: Why Did You Choose This Way of Buying? ... 31
4.4 Question 4: How Often Do You Buy Music? ... 32
4.5 Question 5: Has Your Buying Behavior Changed Since the Beginning of the 21st Century? ... 33
4.6 Question 6: What Are the Main Factors Affecting the Change in the Buying Behavior? ... 33
4.7 Question 7: Have You Ever Downloaded Music Illegally? ... 34
4.8 Question 8: How Often Do You Download Music? ... 35
4.9 Question 9: Reasons for Downloading ... 36
4.10 Question 10: Are There Any Situations Where You Would Consider Paying for Music, e.g. New Release from Favorite Artist? ... 37
4.11 Result from the Focus Group ... 38
5
Analysis ... 42
5.1 Analysis of the Questionnaire ... 42
5.2 Analyzing the Focus Group ... 44
6
Conclusion ... 48
6.1 Conclusion ... 48
6.2 Discussion ... 49
6.2.1 Evaluation and Critique of the Study ... 49
6.2.2 Validity ... 49
6.2.3 Usefulness of the Study ... 50
6.2.4 Suggestions for Further Studies ... 50
References ... 51
7
Appendix ... 54
7.1 Interview with Pär Winberg. ... 54
7.2 Questionnaire on consumer buying behavior among students in the Swedish music industry ... 56
Figure 2-1 The Buying Process (Blackwell et al., 2001) ... 12
Figure 3-1 Modified Trapezoid (Davidsson, 2001) ... 22
Figure 4-1 Amount of Men Buying Music ... 30
Figure 4-2 Amount of Women Buying Music ... 30
Figure 4-3 Proportion of Ways of Buying for Men ... 31
Figure 4-4 Proportion of Ways of Buying for Women ... 31
Figure 4-5 How Often Men Buy Music ... 32
Figure 4-6 How Often Women Buy Music ... 32
Figure 4-7 Change in Buying Behavior for Men ... 33
Figure 4-8 Change in Buying Behavior for Women ... 33
Figure 4-9 Amount of Men Downloading Illegally ... 34
Figure 4-10 Amount of Women Downloading Illegally ... 34
Figure 4-11 Preferred Ways of Downloading Music for Men ... 34
Figure 4-12 Preferred Ways of Downloading Music for Women... 35
Figure 4-13 Download Frequency for Men ... 35
Figure 4-14 Download Frequency for Women... 36
Figure 4-15 Reasons for Downloading Music for Men ... 36
Figure 4-16 Reasons for Downloading Music for Women ... 36
Figure 4-17 Proportion of Men that Would Pay for Music in a Special Situation37 Figure 4-18 Proportion of Women that Would Pay for Music in a Special Situation. ... 37
Definitions
The definitions are taken from The Tech Terms Computer Dictionary (http://www.techterms.com/), which is an online dictionary specialized in technical terms.
Streaming - Data streaming, commonly seen in the forms of audio and video streaming, is
when a multimedia file can be played back without being completely downloaded first
P2P - Stands for "Peer to Peer." In a P2P network, the "peers" are computer systems
which are connected to each other via the Internet. Files can be shared directly between systems on the network without the need of a central server. In other words, each comput-er on a P2P network becomes a file scomput-ervcomput-er as well as a client.
BitTorrent - BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocol designed to reduce
the bandwidth required to transfer files. It does this by distributing file transfers across multiple systems, thereby lessening the average bandwidth used by each computer
Piracy - When someone installs and uses commercial software without paying for the
pro-gram, it is called "pirating" the software. Software piracy is committed by simply download-ing or copydownload-ing a program that a user has not paid for.
Mp3 - Stands for "MPEG-1 Audio Layer-3." MP3 is popular compressed audio file format
1
Introduction
The first chapter of this thesis will present the background. It will also present the problem that the authors want to solve as well as the research questions that the thesis aims to answer. Further it will also include the potential limitations of the thesis.
1.1 Background
From the beginning of the 1990’s the music industry has gone through major changes. From being an industry with large sales during most of the decade it all changed with the century. With the introduction of Napster in 1999 the music industry was changed forever. Napster was a program that made music available for free to the public. By the time Nap-ster was shut down in 2001, after being sued by Recording Industry Association of Ameri-ca (RIAA) along with musiAmeri-cal groups such as MetalliAmeri-ca, there were already many successors ready to pick up where Napster left off. The result was that in 2001 the CD industry showed declining sales for the first time since the introduction of the CD in 1983 (Zentner, 2004).
The sales in the music industry has gone down 70 % but at the same time there are twice as many records being released in 2008 compared to 1994. (P. Winberg, personal communica-tion, 2008-10-11).
According to sales figures the music industry worldwide has dropped in music sales from $36.9bn in 2000 to $29.9bn last year. The main reason for this is the availability of digital downloads, mostly illegal (Financial Times, 2008).
The music industry is facing different sales figures in different parts of the world. While the U.S. market is experiencing that the fall in sales are slowly decreasing there are still negative trends in Europe with especially heavy losses in Austria, France, Portugal, Spain and Swe-den. On average, the European markets experienced that the music sales fell by 5 % in units and 7.7 % in value (Financial Times, 2004).
According to Pär Winberg, there are different consumer trends going on depending on gender with women being more willing to buy CDs than men. Also the general population over 35+ years is still buying albums, whereas the younger customers prefer digital ver-sions. (P. Winberg, personal communication, 2008-10-11).
Another difference that has been forced upon the industry due to the lack of sales is the limits for selling “gold standard” in Sweden. In previous years an artist got a gold record after selling 50,000 units of the record, now the limit has been set to 20,000 due to the drop in sales (P. Winberg, personal communication, 2008-10-11).
The legal alternatives such as iTunes Music Store have affected the music industry in both positive and negative ways. The positive way is that it is an easy access to the media; many people can get the media through the Internet. The downside is that for example iTunes has copy protected media files that bring a lot of bad reputation to the company with people resenting to use the legal alternatives since an iPod is needed to play the files from iTunes (P. Winberg, personal communication, 2008-10-11).
However, while the big record labels are experiencing losses in sales there are many small independent labels started in Sweden. The sales in Sweden are still on a downward going trend, but at the same time there are more titles released than ever before. This is mostly due to the small independent record labels that have been created. The amount of inde-pendent labels has grown with 373 % since the beginning of the century, from 60 to 224. These companies have also had a positive trend in sales, as opposed to the big companies (Dagens Nyheter, 2003).
Freeman speaks in his article Managing Piracy Culture: Corporate Responses to Peer-to-Peer –
Networking (2003) about the music industry today and the role of piracy. There are many
reasons why the music industry is experiencing declined sales; one of the major reasons is piracy. However, according to Freeman (2003), blaming piracy alone for the decrease in sales would be to ignore many of the other factors that affect the industry. Some of those factors are:
The CD market is matured and consumer perceives the price of CDs as too high.
Increased amount of rival goods, such as video games and DVDs.
A lack of musical innovation.
Freeman (2003) continues to argue that by using piracy as the only reason for declining sales is to ignore the role of the companies themselves.
The task of defining piracy is not as easy and straightforward as it might seem from the be-ginning. This is because internet piracy is usually not included in the statistics for the indus-try, and therefore it makes it hard to measure. It ranges from mass burning of CD-Rs for sale to making a selection of mp3s for a friend. The problem is that many people tend to see everything on the Internet as free (Freeman, 2003).
The industry is executing a number of responses to the piracy. One of them is to educate the public about how the laws concerning copyright issues are working. The aim is also to get the public to understand that there are many losers in the current situation. Not only record labels, but also artists and intellectual property owners (Freeman, 2003).
In order to come up with solutions to the piracy problem, the music industry has adopted the peer-2-peer approach and is trying to develop services based on that demand. Attempts are also made to educate the public in order for them to fully understand the consequences of piracy (Freeman 2003).
Paul Hirsch developed in his article, The Structure of the popular music industry (1970), a model of the music industry. According to Hirsch (1970), the music industry is structured in such way that music is filtered on the way from the artist to the audience, a so-called pre-selection
system. What that implies is that in the music industry there are more goods available than
the industry can market. This leads to more products being produced and available than what actually reach the customers (cited in Wikström, 2005).
In the music industry there is a lot of independence between gatekeepers and record com-panies. There are not many new album releases that make it onto the radio stations’ playl-ists for example (Hirsch, cited in Wikström, 2005).
What can be concluded is that the music industry has gone from a regular buying pattern to consumption online. Customers are both buying and downloading music online to a much larger extent than they are buying from regular music stores. A problem is that a lot of the music that is downloaded is shared to people who do not download and affects their buy-ing behavior as well (Zentner 2004).
1.2 Problem
The problem with the music industry in Sweden today is that the sales are on a negative trend and have been that way since the beginning of the century. To make matters worse, the situation is about to slow down and even turn around in the U.S. but in Europe and especially countries like Austria, France and Sweden the trends are still negative (Financial Times 2004).
The main reason for this is the increased level of piracy which enables people easy access to illegal media on the Internet. While record companies are suffering the illegal media available online keeps increasing. This means that music is available online for free, which leads to a situation where neither the record labels nor the artists get any revenues for the music.
One problem is that many people who download music do not seem to think it is a crime they are committing. The general attitude seems to be that it is not such a big deal to down-load music. Further many people seem to think that as long as the music is available online it is free to download and spread.
In a response to the ongoing piracy trends, the Swedish Government has agreed to imple-ment the controversial IPRED law in April 1 2009.
IPRED is an EU directive from 2004 that allows the owner of the copyright protected ma-terial to get the IP address of the person downloading, if there is a reasonable assumption that a violation of the copyright law has taken place. The owner of the material will then be given the permission to come to the suspected person’s house in order to make a house search for proof of that particular violation (Civilrättsliga sanktioner på immaterialrättens område - genomförande av direktiv 2004/48/EG, 2008).
The suspected person will then, if convicted be forced to pay damage fees for the media that has been downloaded illegally (Civilrättsliga sanktioner på immaterialrättens område - genomförande av direktiv 2004/48/EG, 2008)
The authors want to investigate attitudes among Swedish students toward illegal download-ing and piracy. Both internal and external factors will be investigated as well as the ethical aspects of downloading.
This subject is interesting to look at since the problem with piracy is still a big problem in Sweden. Since students often lack financial assets it is interesting to see how they look at piracy and their attitudes toward illegal downloading of music. The authors want to find the underlying factors that motivate piracy and illegal downloading among students.
It is also interesting from the perspective of the consumers when it comes to the soon im-plemented IPRED law and to investigate how the attitudes will change among the Swedish students once the law has been implemented.
1.3 Purpose
The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the attitudes toward piracy and illegal download-ing among Swedish students.
1.4 Research questions
The thesis aims to answer the following research questions:
What is the present state of downloading activity among Swedish students and their intentions to download in the future?
What motivates piracy among Swedish students?
What effect has piracy had on the consumer behavior among Swedish students?
1.5 Delimitations
The authors of the thesis have limited the focus group sample to Jönköping International Business School (JIBS) students as it would not be possible to investigate the attitudes for the entire Swedish population. In this thesis a student is defined as a university student. Further, this thesis is limited to piracy as a factor for the declining sales of the music indus-try. It is understood that other factors, such as a global economic slowdown and mature markets, are also affecting the current situation in the music industry. However, these fac-tors have been left out of this thesis and the authors cannot fully know the extent to which these factors really affect the industry.
The quantitative survey conducted by the authors have been limited to students from the following cities; Jönköping, Linköping, Stockholm and Uppsala. The majority of the stu-dents are however from Jönköping.
In the focus group the participants were all from Jönköping University. Although the au-thors acknowledge that this is not optimal, this was done due to the fact that a focus group takes time to arrange and conduct. Students from other schools in Sweden did not have the time or possibility to travel to Jönköping for one hour of interview.
2
Frame of Reference
This chapter describes the theories that this thesis is based on. It presents different theories in order to give different angles of the phenomenon. Further this section will present some of the relevant previous research conducted in this field of study.
2.1 Previous Research
There has been extensive previous research on the music industry and piracy. Most re-search focus on the music industry and how piracy has affected the downturn in sales. The authors focus on the consumer, in this case university students and their attitudes towards piracy and illegal downloading.
Fetscherin and Lattemann discuss in their article Motives and Willingness to Pay for Digital
Mu-sic (2007), the consumer behavior in respect to digital content.
Fetscherin and Lattemann (2007) are testing each of the factors with a number of hypo-theses to determine whether each individual factor is affecting the behavior. The factors that are tested are:
Socio-demographics factors, to see if there are differences in consumer behavior
be-tween men and women.
Economic factors, in order to find how the purchasing power of the customers is
af-fected by the income.
Experience and usage, to determine how experience and amount of computer usage
affects the willingness to pay for music.
Risk factors, in order to find the connection between the willingness to take risk and
the willingness to pay for digital media.
Technological factors to test if customers who own special music systems such as mp3
players and CD burning equipment are less willing to pay for digital media. Digital Rights Management, in order to find whether restriction of usability, such as
special software needed to play the audio file, has a negative effect on the willing-ness to pay.
The conclusion of the paper is that people are indeed willing to pay for digital music, but there are many factors that affect how willing they are to pay. Further it shows that people would be even more willing to pay if piracy was not an option. All the above mentioned factors affect the consumers to various extents.
This article has helped the authors with choosing specific factors to do deeper research on. By using the article by Fetscherin and Lattemann (2007) the authors can choose some of the many complex factors to analyze and further investigate. Since the buying process for digital music is very complex the authors have chosen to select a few factors and investigate them further. Many of the factors were discussed in the focus group that took place.
Linmayen, Khalifa and Chin talk in their article Factors Motivating Software Piracy: A
Longitu-dinal Study (2004) about the factors that influence piracy. In the article Linmayen et al
inves-tigate how factors such as habits, perceived consequences and social factors affect the ac-tual pirate behavior.
The conclusion from this article is that all the factors investigated affected the actual pirate behavior. However, it also shows that while habits and factors that facilitate pirate behavior
are strongly related to piracy behavior, intentions do not necessary lead to actual pirarcy behavior (Linmayen et al., 2004).
The article by Linmayen et al. (2004) has served as a template for which factors to investi-gate by the authors. Further the article has helped with choosing the topics to cover and which different factors that are relevant to investigate further in the focus group.
2.2 Theoretical Framework
The so called traditional music industry is changing rapidly due to changes in technology, more fierce competition, fast altering music tastes of people, and the globalization effect on music. Musicians, record companies, promoters, and entrepreneurs are creating different ways of making business within the music industry and how music can be distributed to consumers (Lathrop, 2003).
As this thesis concentrates on the Swedish students’ attitudes toward illegal downloading and piracy, relevant theories were found and used. The use of relevant theories has helped the authors with a foundation to build the thesis upon. Further, it helps with finding ap-propriate aspects of what phenomenon to investigate and analyze.
The theoretical framework is mainly based upon different aspects of consumer behavior such as several steps of consumer decision process model, attitudes, needs, motivation, eth-ics, but other factors besides consumer behavior as well, like e-commerce and music related issues over the Internet.
This thesis’ biggest emphasis will be on consumer behavior, which “is the study of the processes
involved when individuals or groups select, purchase, use, or dispose of products, services, ideas, or expe-riences to satisfy needs and desires.” (Solomon, Zaichkowsky, and Polegato, 2008, p. 6). This is,
because the understanding of how consumers acquire products or services is the basis for the recognition of the music acquisition process. In addition, attitudes, ethics, values, and motivations explain our behavior and are therefore fundamental theories in consumer be-havior. Furthermore, the importance of understanding how people behave as consumers at large is crucial for the recognition of the core issues of this report.
2.3 The Consumer Decision Process (CDP) Model
The Consumer Decision Process (CDP) model concentrates on the stages consumers have in a buying process of products and services. It is an essential model regardless of the in-dustry, and is applicable in almost every situation of product and service acquisitions. It thus makes it easier to understand how consumers act when purchasing a product or ser-vice and the reasons behind that behavior. Understanding this model also helps to realize the process of acquiring music in general. Blackwell, Miniard and Engel (2001) state that the model consists of seven different stages: need recognition, search for information, pre-purchase evaluation of alternatives, pre-purchase, consumption, post-consumption evaluation, and divestment. The emphasis in this section is put on the first three stages, which are rele-vant with the purpose of this study.
Figure 2-1 The Buying Process (Blackwell et al., 2001)
2.3.1 Need Recognition
Solomon et al., (2008) state that the first stage of the Consumer Decision Process Model is need recognition, which is often interchangeably used as problem recognition. It arises when a consumer notices a remarkable difference between the present and a desired state. The consumer becomes aware of a need or problem that needs to be fulfilled and solved. Foxall (1980) claims that some needs consumers have may come out only after companies have “created” these needs and are marketed to them. It is however, more common that companies try to fulfill the needs that consumers already have. The concept of needs is more closely discussed in section 2.11.
2.3.2 Search for Information
After the need has been discovered, consumers begin to look for the solution that meets the needs. People therefore need to search information of several of alternatives that are available (Foxall, 1980). The search for information can be divided into two categories: in-ternal and exin-ternal. Inin-ternal search means obtaining knowledge from the searcher’s own memory and habits. External is, on the other hand, searching information for example from family, and different marketplaces such as stores, and shopping malls. Consumers can also passively search information, which means they do not really pay attention for the ac-tual search process, but may subconsciously become more open to new information. Ac-tive search of information means that consumers for example pay attention to advertise-ments, read more publications, find information from Internet, or just simply go to look around in shops or malls (Blackwell et al., 2001).
Foxall (1980) notes that the higher price of the desired product or service, and if it is pur-chased seldom, the more probable it is that the consumer looks information also from close people such as family and friends. Wells and Prensky (1996) add that these kinds of high price products belong to a high involvement category. In order to purchase products or services in this category usually requires a lot of information gathering. An opposite of these are low involvement products that do not require so much involvement in the buying process. The typical attribute of a low-involvement product is a low price.
Blackwell et al. (2001) argue that some of the variables that have an effect on the informa-tion search are personality, social class, income, size of the purchase, past experiences, brand perceptions, and customer satisfaction. Strong customer satisfaction reduces the time spent on finding extra information, since satisfied customers tend to buy often from the same company. There are many important sources of information. Some of them, such as
family, friends, leaders, and media can have an essential impact on the consumer’s purchase process. These non-marketed sources of information include also Internet, which nowa-days is, and through time will be very important source. Fletcher, Bell & McNaughton (2004) claim that the search for information online provides a broader perspective on the markets, because with the help of the Internet, the market is perhaps more depth than only the physical markets, since product category sites, consumer-dominated websites, bulletin boards and chat rooms can be used, instead of using only traditional methods for searching information.
2.3.3 Pre-Purchase Evaluation of Alternatives
After the information search consumers begin to compare different alternatives and try to find out which is the most suitable choice and narrow down these options. A problem can sometimes be the large amount of alternatives in the market. These alternatives need to be first identified. The consumer determines what the important characteristics of the product or service are. A person, who has a major problem to solve, usually tends to evaluate many different options whereas a simple purchase can be based on habits i.e. routine shopping, (Solomon et al., 2008), also known as habitual decision making (Blackwell et al., 2001).
Ha-bitual decision making is explained more carefully in section 2.9. Wells and Prensky (1996) add
that if the product belongs to a so called high involvement class, consumers tend to put more time on evaluating different options. When it comes to the low-involvement product it is the opposite; people tend to spend very little time evaluating.
Some goods like movies and music are hard to evaluate before buying or viewing it. The possibility to read critic reviews can have an effect on the buying decision, but other factors such as expectations and product interest make also an impact on the buying decision. The location plays a role as well when the product or service alternatives are being assessed. Consumers evaluate the location where to buy the product in many ways. Some factors are for example the store’s consumer traffic, how clean it is, and if there are many checkout lanes or not. These previous mentioned characteristics play a role when the quality and price of the products and services of stores are almost equal (Blackwell et al., 2001).
2.4 Purchase Behavior in the E-Commerce Revolution
Consumers nowadays tend to prefer buying music and many other products and services from Internet due to several reasons. It is therefore important to understand what it means to purchase online, and why people in many cases prefer that. Despite the success of online shopping in recent years, many may wonder if there are some disadvantages. When having a discussion about online business, the word e-commerce is usually referred to. Understanding e-commerce is crucial for understanding how record labels can take advantage of it, how it works, how music can be distributed online and if e-commerce has some drawbacks. Turban, Leidner, McLean and Wetherbe (2006) have investigated this subject and define Electronic commerce (e-commerce, EC) as something that refers to business situations where transactions, such as buying, selling,, transferring, or exchanging products or services are conducted over the Internet, intranets, and extranets. One significant advantage of e-commerce compared to traditional way of doing business in physical stores is that consum-ers can find information, look for products and services, and buy them whenever it is con-venient, allowing 24 hours access to the website. That is one reason why e-commerce is predicted to grow to become a major player in various markets. Fletcher et al. (2004) re-mind that e-commerce and e-business are often used interchangeably.
E-commerce provides a lot of advantages for consumers. It for example usually provides products and services cheaper than they are sold in physical stores. Other major advantages of e-commerce are that information is obtained instantly; it enables electronic auctions,
ex-changing ideas, and sharing experiences (Turban et al., 2006). In addition to that, it is easier to customize prices and create new markets (Fletcher et al., 2004).
The rapid development of information technology, including Internet, has affected the companies’ marketing- and business strategies. The positive side of e-business for firms is that they can reach customers around the world, where as a physical store attracts custom-ers usually only from the nearby areas. On the other hand, firms can expect fierce competi-tion, because now thousands of companies can sell theoretically to any consumer around the world. In addition, e-commerce is becoming a problem for music stores, since music producers can nowadays simply put their music for sale online, without needing help from the intermediaries anymore (Solomon et al., 2008).
Online music stores can be successful if they provide good customer service. Another way of attracting customers is offering extra value for them. Although e-commerce has been very successful in the recent years, it has some limitations that need to be taken account for. One disadvantage is the possible lack of security. It can be for example dangerous to pay online with a credit card, because it is possible that the card information will be stolen. Another reason not to buy online is that it is not always possible to be certain that the product is something that the consumer really wants. Clothes are an example of this; clothes cannot be tried online and therefore it is questionable whether they should be bought at all online (Solomon et al., 2008). There is also a potential threat to consumers’ privacy, since it is possible for hackers or the website administrators to find out informa-tion about the consumer. In addiinforma-tion, many legal issues and the lack of nainforma-tional and inter-national standards of the industry may have its limitations on e-commerce (Turban et al., 2006).
2.5 Music Distribution, Acquirement, and Consumption over
the Internet
As the Internet has clearly affected the market situation in the Swedish music industry, it is useful for the authors to have a look on how the online music selling happens and the dif-ferences between the past time and Internet-period. Lathrop (2003) shows some important aspects of how music is distributed over the Internet and how the situation is different be-fore the Internet-age. It is obvious that the Internet has affected the music industry’s way of distributing music to consumers. Nowadays, Internet plays an important role in the marketing and distribution sectors. Some major advantages of music distribution over the Internet are that it is inexpensive compared to the traditional distribution of physical prod-ucts (CDs). Due to Internet, there are also new ways of selling music.
1. Before people had to limit their listening to the radio playlists. Nowadays, any kind of music can be chosen online to be streamed.
2. People had to go to stores to buy CDs during their opening hours. Now it is possi-ble to acquire enormous amounts of music from Internet right to the computer 24/7.
3. Sharing music is no longer lending CDs. The new trend is sending links to music offering websites or databases.
Lathrop (2003) concludes that Internet provides the maximum flexibility for the customers’ needs. Examples of how music can be acquired are many: to buy CDs online to be deli-vered by mail, to have a subscription to a music site (includes streaming and downloading), to have a one-time payment for a single or CD download. These kinds of transactions can be carried out on private websites, on artists’ own websites, mainstream subscription sites, mass-market online retailers, and niche-market online retailers.
2.6 Consumer Intentions
It is crucial for companies to understand how consumers behave, because then it is easier to estimate the consumer demand for a certain product and thus produce the right amount of that product or service. Record labels need also to consider these issues of what is the consumer demand for CDs, how much to produce them and at what price and where to sell them.
Blackwell et al (2001). claim that if the companies do not pay much attention on this mat-ter, there can be overproduction or a shortage of the product. As this is important, it is beneficial for the authors of this thesis to also find out where, when, and how consumers buy. Consumers’ intention often turn out to be relatively reliable sources of information to predict how they will act in the future, because people often to do what they have planned. On the other hand, Solomon et al. (2008) point out that sometimes intentions and actual behavior can collide. This could be because of changed plans, financial situation, lack of time, or that the product is sold out. Then other methods, such as downloading it illegally online could step in.
Sometimes consumers’ intentions are not ethical. It is therefore of use to look on some theories of unethical behavior of consumers. That is the dark side of consumer behavior, and it includes such acts as thefts. Thefts are a major issue in business and cause severe losses to companies (Solomon et al., 2008). Thefts happen in all areas of business, but it is very common in music industry, because it is easy and fast to acquire music from Internet by downloading it. Sometimes it is so common, that it is not even seen as a crime. Babakus, Cornwell, Mitchell and Schlegelmilch (2004) remind that a lot of research has been con-ducted in the area of unethical consumer behavior in the recent years. They also claim that people under 35 years old may have a larger tendency towards unethical online consumer behavior than those above 35 years. The ethical issues are taken into a closer look at sec-tion 2.15.
2.7 Types of Buying Decision Process
Consumers do not always engage in a certain type of buying decision process, but instead have various kinds of buying behaviors. That is why it is useful to have a look at different processes when consumers are buying products or services and to notice how they are es-sential behaviors among consumers in music industry. Blackwell et al. (2001) state that con-sumers may have sometimes complex buying decisions that are time consuming and can require a lot of effort. However, usually customers have relatively simple buying processes that do not require so much time and energy. Blackwell et al. (2001) highlights some theo-ries of the several of buying decision processes. These can be valuable when understanding how consumers acquire music.
Consumers often repeat their purchases. These repeat purchases can be divided into two categories: repeated problem solving, and habitual decision making.
Repeated problem solving often occurs when consumers need to re-purchase
some-thing. This could happen when for example the consumer is dissatisfied with a pur-chase or when a store does not have the right product for sale at that time (Black-well et al., 2001).
Habitual Decision Making refers to the consumer’s buying process state when only
lit-tle or no effort is being done in order to get the product or service. The effort in this case means largely information search. This is due to the situation that the purchase situations have become such a routine that there is not really paid atten-tion to the buying process. These kinds of routine purchases are often very efficient
due to the saved time in form of the lack of information search. Therefore there the time is minimized and not that much energy spent on these basic purchase processes (Solomon et al., 2008).
This phenomenon can be seen also in music industry where many consumers may consider acquiring music as so normal part of their life that it has become more of a routine for them. There is not necessarily that much time put on the purchase process of music. That is why in many cases acquiring music could be seen as a part of consumers’ habitual deci-sion making, although this is not always the case.
2.8 Market Struggle
Since the record labels are greatly suffering due to the decreased sales of CDs, the struggle of the power in the market between companies and consumers is presented here. Solomon et al. (2008) discuss about which of the consumers or companies that controls the market. It is not always easy to realize the situation, and it has become even more complex question due to the different ways of buying that did not exist before, but do exist now. It may have been before, that companies had the control of the market and could determine where, how, and when goods and services were purchased. However, as time has passed, that situ-ation has changed, consumers can nowadays more easily choose where, how, and when they buy.
Naturally, consumers still need firms to produce the products and services they need, but consumers have simply more power to buy from companies that best fit consumers’ re-quirements (Solomon et al., 2008).This can especially be seen in the music industry, where traditional record companies have problems with reduced sales of CDs due to the changed demands of consumers. People have several ways of buying and in general, acquiring music and therefore it is not a necessity to buy the music records in the form of CDs from physi-cal stores.
2.9 Needs
The concept of needs is important in the area of consumer behavior and thus has also an effect on the acquisition process of CDs. In order to understand what it means, the word
need is defined in the following way: “A need is the lack of something necessary for survival or well-being.” (Antonides & Fred van Raaij, 1998, p. 169). According to Foxall (1980), consumer
behavior is much based various needs there are. Blackwell et al. (2001) have written about these needs, and two interesting needs can be pointed out to relate with consumers needs in music industry.
The Need for Pleasure. People need pleasure in many forms and they need to be
satis-fied in various ways. An example of this is food. People do not always eat because they are hungry. Some eat just to get some pleasure of it. The whole entertainment industry is build to satisfy consumers’ need for pleasure. Some of its products and services are television, music, fictional books, amusement parks, movies, nightclubs and so on. They are all important to consumers, because they create pleasure. Lath-rop (2003) states as well that music belongs into this category: it is “consumed” for emotional reasons.
The Need for Variety. Consumers tend to get bored if they keep on consuming the
same product time after time. That is why consumers change their purchases once in a while. Companies try to fulfill the consumers’ needs by providing different ver-sions of their products (Blackwell et al., 2001). Example could be a music radio
sta-tion that has to provide different genres of music for listeners with various tastes. In order to get the potential customer to listen, the radio stations can emphasize the variety in the advertisements
Motivational intensity stands for “how strongly consumers are motivated to satisfy a particular need” (Blackwell et al., 2001, p. 247). An example of that could be a hungry person who has not eaten for the whole day. Then in this case, his motivational intensity to get some food is very high as the person really needs to eat (Blackwell et al., 2001). The same can be applied to music industry; if a consumer has a strong interest or desire for a certain CD, then there is a high motivational intensity to acquire the album in some way, whether it is for example by buying, downloading, or some other way.
2.10 Motivation and Values
People have different motivations when acquiring products and services. The authors feel that it is important and vital to understand how these motivations and values have an im-pact on consumer behavior and how buying CDs or downloading mp3s illegally are moti-vated by a consumer. The word motivation means “the process by which an individual recognizes a
need and takes action to satisfy it.” (Wells & Prensky, 1996, p. 227). Foxall (1980) adds that the
motivational behavior has some sort of goal.
Antonides and Fred van Raaij (1998) divide motivations to negative and positive ones, the former being meant for solving problems, and the latter for improving something and to add value. Some factors affecting the consumers’ motivations are emotions like worry and happiness, but also things like people, situations, and social pressure. Foxall, (1980) claims that in many cases the reasons behind consumer action are both social and physiological needs. It is also frequent that the choices a consumer does regarding purchasing products and services are related that consumer’s values and beliefs (Solomon et al., 2008).
Values are defined as “stable beliefs regarding desired behavior or end states” (Antonides and Fred
van Raaij, 1998, p. 40). Antonides and Fred van Raaij (1998) argue that values provide rea-sons and ways of a certain behavior. Values could be seen as ideas of how to behave, for example being truthfulness. Goals and attitudes can be drawn from values, and they are the basis for forming opinions. Sheth, Mittal and Newman (1999) continue that values are pur-pose people live for. Values are a significant determinant in a consumer’s buying decision process, and they affect for example the ways consumers buy and acquire music. Further-more, Solomon et al. (2008) remind that values differ between consumers.
2.11 Consuming Needs and Values: Economic Approaches to
Needs
Rational consumers strive to achieve the happiness of their own – not others, and they do not question much that kind of thinking if it is egoistic or not. That is why consumers also try to get products that create the most value. Products and services create value to various amounts and there has been developed an important concept “marginal utility” - that meas-ures how much consumer’s benefit of a certain product. The concept called marginal utility is important in consumer theory (Desmond, 2003). If for example consumers have only a small amount of music available in the markets, they are ready to pay a higher price to get some of that. On the other hand, a huge amount of music, or whatever good it is, lowers the consumers’ willingness to pay for that product or service.
2.12 Time Budgets
The lack of time can be a reason for illegal downloading. Solomon et al. (2008) state that time is a limitation that all consumers face. It is a scarce resource, which means that no
matter what, there is always 24 hours in a day. That is why time has its effects on buying decisions. Many people nowadays for example feel that they are busier than ever. This is called time poverty. Due to the time poverty, many consumers make their purchases deci-sion based on time; the faster the purchase process, the better.
2.13 Money as Votes
The music industry in Sweden and almost all over the world has suffered greatly due to the reduced sales of CDs. Record companies surely know that there probably is something wrong about their products, prices, or business strategies; otherwise the sales would not drop that heavily as they so far have. Instead of purchasing CDs from physical stores, con-sumers have for some reason decided to use their money on something else. Therefore Desmond (2003) argues that it can be seen that consumers have the power to vote with their money. Satisfying products and services are bought – and this does not apply only to music industry. If satisfying products that meet the consumers’ expectations are not availa-ble, the sales are then in danger to drop. As Lathrop (2003) also notes, the price of buying music must be in the range of what people can and would like to pay for it.
The theory of consumers’ money as votes makes it easier to understand how consumers can affect for example the record companies, their products, and their way of conducting business. This is presented by Desmond (2003), who argues that the money consumers have can be seen as numbers of votes. One dollar equals to one vote and thus by buying something, consumers vote which products appeal most. Consumers have the possibility to withdraw votes if some product or service does not satisfy in some expected way. When consumers feel the same way about a product that does not satisfy, they all tend to begin searching for alternatives and thus abandoning this certain product or service. This is not always the case though; although one consumer decides to vote in a different way, others may not feel the same way and keep on consuming just as before.
Sometimes consumers try to make a difference on various issues related to for example a certain company and its products. The company’s products can be produced in a wrong way. Examples are environmentally hostile products, expensive products, low quality prod-ucts and so on. Desmond (2003) states that the consumers can organize boycotts and stop buy the product. This way they hope to cause a change in the company’s actions. This can be related to record companies and how they produce their “products” i.e. sellable music. Harrison, Newholm, and Shaw (2005) point out that the consumers should know and be responsible of the effects that arise due to their activities.
2.14 Attitudes
Attitudes certainly have some effect on how consumers behave and the concept is presented
here to better understand what attitudes are and how they could affect the music industry. It is defined in the following way: “An attitude is a learned predisposition to respond in a consistently
favorable or unfavorable manner with respect to a given object.” (Schiffman & Lazar Kanuk, 1987, p.
270). Peter and Olson (2008) continue that when consumers combine aspects such as knowledge and beliefs of an attitude concept, the general assessment of an object can be made. Foxall (1980) points out that they are most often either-or type of variables: positive, negative, supportable, non-supportable, and are acquired during lifetime. Solomon et al. (2008) continues that attitudes are often relatively constant, and can be fit in many situa-tions. Consumers tend to have attitudes and opinions toward products and their superiority over others, but also how often these products or services should be purchased or used. However, despite of being relatively constant, Schiffman and Lazar Kanuk (1998) remind that attitudes are occasionally subject to change. Peter and Olson (2008) add that attitudes can affect consumer behavior as well
Foxall (1980) notices also that consumers’ attitudes have a link to our behavior, and this in-teraction is a two-way process: both attitudes and behavior affect each other. It could be useful to have a perception of consumers’ attitudes, to be able to know if their attitudes for some reason could, or should be changed.
Could attitudes explain the some aspects of the consumer behavior in the music acquiring process? Peter and Olson (2008) claim that there can be a contradiction between consum-ers’ attitudes and buying behavior. There are for example highly positive attitudes towards certain products, but due to their price or unavailability, they are unaffordable or unattaina-ble. Solomon et al. (2008) provides few more examples: the desired product can be out of stock or the customer gets robbed on the way to buy the product. Sometimes the social pressure of other people can affect a consumer’s behavior.
Therefore the past buying behavior may be better indicator of future behavior, compared to consumers’ attitude evaluation. Foxall (1980) states that attitudes are possible to change, but they are usually relatively steady. They can end up costing a lot for a firm that for ex-ample tries that through marketing action. Peter and Olson (2008) continue that one way to do that is to try to affect consumers’ beliefs on a certain issue.
2.15 Ethical Consumer Behavior
Consumer ethics is a significant subject that needs to be taken into account when trying to understand the overall phenomena of music piracy, attitudes, and values. Antonides and Fred van Raaij (1998) claim that there is a link between consumer ethics and values. Due to the variation of values among consumers, opinions differ and therefore provide many kinds of ethical ways of behaving. Chatzidakis and Mitussis (2007) mention that the ethical consumer behavior consists of factors involved in consumer buying process that are influ-enced by the consumer’s ethical worries.
Vitell and Muncy, (1992) mention that different aspects have different effect on the con-sumers’ ethical decisions. Consumers tend to consider unethical behavior sometimes ac-ceptable, if the company is seen responsible of being wrong. Other factors that affect the ethical behavior are if a consumer’s decision creates harm to the seller, the consumer’s atti-tude towards the company, and if unethical is the same as illegal. Fullerton, Kerch and Dodge (1996) state that the more the consumers have moral concerns, the steadier they are in consuming situations. In addition, unethical behavior seems to be more acceptable when there are no major economical consequences for the seller.
2.16 Purchase Knowledge
Consumers need to know in most of the cases what they are buying, including in the music industry. Therefore there is a need for purchase knowledge. How much a music album costs and where it is sold could be a consumers questions when some music needs to be bought. The theory of purchase knowledge is therefore needed to be understood in order to be able to recognize what consumers think about prices, timing, and risks of buying for example CDs.
Consumers have a certain amount of knowledge about the products of interest. This know-ledge includes things as what is the price, where can it be bought and so on. Price is one of the most important determinants when buying a product or service. Foxall (1980) notices also that the higher the price, usually the higher the expectations of the quality of the ob-ject. Blackwell et al. (2001) continues that companies have good reasons to hold their prices down if they want to retain old customers and attract new ones. On the other hand, con-sumers are not always aware of prices of certain products, and then companies can take ad-vantage of the situation and hold prices high, at least as long as the consumers become
more aware what the prices should be. It is of great advantage to understand how much the consumer understands the absolute price of the product, as well as the relative price i.e. price compared to competitors’ prices.
Consumers have certain beliefs about the timing when to buy. One example of that is the delay consumers have for a product purchase, since they are waiting for a suitable time when a certain product enters the market. In addition, consumers often delay their pur-chases, since it is assumable that the price decreases over time. It is important to consider where the product should be bought. There are nowadays several ways to buy products, such as retail stores, catalogues, or Internet to mention few. Purchase knowledge makes a difference where consumers buy. An alternative way of buying a product will not be consi-dered, if there is no information of that certain channel to purchase the product. This has been a problem for example for Internet. There are a lot of consumers that do not know about the possibilities people have when purchasing online (Blackwell et al., 2001).
Consumers always face some amount of risk in a purchase process. Perceived risk means that the purchase of a product does not necessarily create a pleasing result (Sheth et al., 1999). Consumers become increasingly risk averse when the risk of the product purchase increases. Therefore consumers tend to find out information about the product that inter-ests in order to reduce risk that something goes wrong. With higher knowledge about the product as backup, the consumer can make better decisions about the purchase (Blackwell et al., 2001).
2.17
Summary of Theories
In this thesis, the authors are using theories in consumer behavior and attitudes as well as in e-commerce. Together the theories form the foundation for the thesis. The different theories are important for different parts of the. An important theory when analyzing the questionnaires is the Consumer Decision Process. It helps the authors investigate the steps a consumer goes through when facing a decision whether to buy a product or not.
The theories concerning attitudes, has been used to analyze the focus group since they give an understanding of what attitudes are and how they affect the consumer buying behavior. Definitions from Schiffman and Lazar Kanuk (1987) and Peter and Olson (2008) as well as Foxall (1980) have helps the authors define and investigate the focus group.
3
Method
The method section presents the research tools and techniques used to obtain information in order to conduct this thesis. Research methods included are both qualitative and quantitative and the collected material con-sists of both primary and secondary data.
3.1 Research Structure
This thesis has been carried out as shown by figure 1.1. A short summary of the different sections including description and correlation is presented below.
In the introduction of this report, the background of the study is presented. It provides suitable information related to the topic in which it gives a brief overview. The background is correlated to the problem and works as an informative tunnel which in the end leads up to a stated purpose. It includes a descriptive explanation of the Swedish music industry and the state of it today.
The problem section is a continuation of the background section. It describes what the subject matter of the thesis is and why the topic would be interesting to study. Important questions answered in this section are: What is the problem? Why is it important to investi-gate the problem? As stated in the background section, sales within the Swedish music in-dustry are decreasing and have been since the beginning of the 21st century. The current
situation with the high level of piracy and access to illegal media files makes the topic im-portant and interesting to study.
The purpose follows the problem statement and displays the meaning of the thesis, what to study and to focus on. It is clear and concise and denotes what specific aspects of the prob-lem that the authors aim at treating in their investigation. The stated purpose is explanatory and aims at analyzing the attitudes among Swedish students toward illegal media and piracy. The following section describes in fully how the included data in the thesis have been col-lected and why the authors have chosen such method. Questions answered in the method section are:
What type of data will be needed?
How will the data be collected?
How many respondents are necessary? How do you choose or identify them?
What kind of questions will be included in the survey/interview? Why have they been chosen?
How will the empirical findings and analysis be presented?
The theories used are stated in the frame of references section and the collected data are displayed under empirical findings. The two sections are correlated in the analysis, in which the theories are integrated with the empirical data.
The final two parts consist of the authors’ conclusions and a discussion of the study, in which comments are made on implications and criticism is given on chosen method. The conclusion consists of a summary of the analysis and overall impressions and interpreta-tions throughout the study. The conclusion is linked to the purpose and provides answers to the stated research questions. In the end, a final discussion is made where recommenda-tions are given on future studies.
Figure 3-1 Modified Trapezoid (Davidsson, 2001)
3.2 Research Approach
When conducting a research that involves the use of theories it is important to first of all decide upon a research approach. Depending on how the theories will be used the re-searchers can either go ahead with an inductive approach or a deductive approach. Using an inductive approach implies that a theory is developed as a result of the collected and analyzed data. The deductive approach works the other way around and bases the research on theories, in which they will be tested towards the analyzed data and either, be accepted or rejected (Saunders, Lewis & Thornhill, 2003).
Based on the design and the stated purpose of the thesis, a deductive approach has been used throughout the study. Already developed theories were collected from academic litera-ture in order to help answering the stated research questions and to “provide the basis of
ex-planation” (Hussey and Hussey, 1997:52) to the purpose (Cited in Saunders et al., 2003).
As stated in the purpose, the research is based on students’ attitudes and consumer habits when it comes to consuming music, legally and illegally. The interest within the topic was increased due to the present problem concerning illegal use of media files. Research ques-tions were then stated in order to work as guidelines, creating question marks which in the end were to be answered in the analysis. Theoretical framework within consumer behavior worked as a helping hand, showing models on how consumers’ attitudes and beliefs are af-fected by internal and external factors.
Theories within marketing research provided practical information on how to conduct suit-able surveys for data collection. By the use of these methods combined with theories and models within consumer behavior the researchers were able to test the deduced research questions towards the empirical findings to see if the outcome confirmed the way consum-ers tend to think when consuming music. The design of the research and how the data was collected will be thoroughly explained in the upcoming sections.
3.3 Research Design
The research design displays the framework of the study and is used as a guide when it comes to collecting and analyzing data. There are many different ways of conducting a
re-search, usually not just one single correct way. However, it is important that the research design is relevant to the problem (Gilbert A. Churchill Jr., 1983).
The authors of this thesis have conducted both a descriptive and an explanatory study. The purpose of a descriptive research is “to portray an accurate profile of persons, events or situations” (Robson 2002:59). Data was collected to create an understanding within consumer beha-vior in the Swedish music industry. The research was very basic and worked as a primary stage for the explanatory study. The negative aspect of the descriptive research is that it on-ly displays the empirical data. No further anaon-lysis or drawn conclusions are made, which is why the authors chose to go ahead with an explanatory study (Cited in Saunders et al., 2003).
Explanatory studies clarify the relationship between two variables. It goes one step further than a descriptive study and explains not only how something is, but also why. The authors decided to conduct further studies and to focus on consumers’ attitudes towards illegal downloading and piracy. The goal was to find explanations and reasons behind the way students tend to consume music. By locating the factors that influence their certain way of behaving and to understand their ethical and moral attitudes within the subject it provided a deeper understanding, answering questions such as “why students choose to download music
ille-gally even though it is a crime?” (Saunders et al., 2003).
Studies can be conducted in different ways. The most common way is to use cross-sectional studies, which implies that a phenomenon (or phenomena) is researched at a par-ticular time. Quantitative surveys are mostly used within cross-sectional studies, but many case studies are also based on qualitative data, such as interviews. The other way of con-ducting a survey is through longitudinal studies, which means that people or events are ob-served and studied during a longer period of time (Saunders et al., 2003).
The authors have used cross-sectional studies in form of a quantitative (defined in next pa-ragraph) and a qualitative survey (see further down for definition) to collect data. Cross-sectional surveys include data that is obtained from a number of different respondents at a single point in time (Proctor, 2003). It is the most common and best known method for descriptive design and can be conducted in two different ways; through field studies and through field surveys (Churchill, 1983).
Quantitative research is used to put data into numbers, investigate entire population (or a sample of one) and to facilitate the application of statistical methods (Davidsson, 1997). Qualitative research refers to understanding a phenomenon. It is usually unstructured and conducted through interviews, where the main focus is emphasized on attitudes and opi-nions. Qualitative research does not measure the amount of emotions, but they give a dee-per insight of the dominant feeling (Bradley, 2007).
A field survey was conducted through a quantitative survey, including a questionnaire on students’ buying behavior in the Swedish music industry. The survey included a large repre-sentative sample, which consisted of randomly selected students in Sweden. It provided a greater scope due to its large number of participants and worked as a foundation for fur-ther studies (Churchill, 1983).
The researched field study was conducted through a focus group. Students who previously had answered the questionnaires were selected to participate in an hour long discussion. The discussion focused on attitudes and ethics towards illegal downloading and piracy. More in-depth answers were given, providing the authors a greater understanding behind students’ reasoning (Churchill, 1983).
3.4 Data collection method
3.4.1 Secondary Data
Secondary data is data that has already been collected for another topic (Bradley, 2007). It provides a possibility to reanalyze data and to give more insight within the background and the problem. The data can be both qualitative and quantitative and can consist of docu-mentary secondary data, including written materials, such as books, journals, newspapers and academic articles (Saunders et al., 2003).
In the thesis secondary data was mainly used to provide practical information to the back-ground, to understand the problem and to gain a useful insight into the Swedish music in-dustry. Academic articles written by Wikström (2005) and Freeman (2003) in the The
inter-national Journal of Media Management, supplied official information about how the industry is
doing and how much that has been lost due to piracy, as well as what alternatives the music industry has been trying to come up with in order to fight the increasing piracy. Articles from newspapers such as Dagens Nyheter and Financial Times were also used to provide statistical data on the downturn in sales within the music industry.
The researchers also collected material from previous research, which to a certain extent provided ideas on which research questions to rise and guidelines on how to conduct the needed surveys. The previous research is more connected to the purpose and the used aca-demic articles focus more on the consumer as individual and influential factors in consum-er behavior. Fetschconsum-erin and Lattemann (2007) discuss in their article the Motives and Wil-lingness to Pay for Digital Music, while Linmayen, Khalifa & Chin talks in their article
Fac-tors Motivating Software Piracy: A Longitudinal Study (2004) about the facFac-tors that influence and
affect piracy behavior.
To find these academic articles and journals the researchers used the university library, newspapers and databases online such as; J-stor, Business Source Premium and Emerald. Google Scholar was also used to discover previous research.
3.4.2 Primary Data
Primary data is about collecting original information straight from the source. There are many different ways to collect the data and there are advantages and disadvantages with each method (Bradley, 2007).
To collected primary data within the thesis includes both qualitative and quantitative re-searches. Qualitative research refers to understanding. It is usually unstructured and con-ducted through interviews, where the main focus is emphasized on attitudes and opinions. Qualitative research does not measure the amount of emotions, but they give a deeper in-sight of the dominant feeling. (Bradley, 2007)
The researchers chose to conduct a qualitative research, an interview with Pär Winberg at EMI Music, in order to collect primary data, suitable for the background and the stated problem. The interview was structured and consisted of predetermined formal questions, due to the limited amount of time with the interviewee. The inquiry was sent by e-mail which also made the standardization of the questions more logical. It included nine major questions along with follow-up questions. All the questions were open-ended in order for the researchers to get an as accurate view of the current situation within the Swedish music industry as possible. Since Winberg was allowed to use his own expertise the open-ended questions were chosen so that he was allowed to fully elaborate his view of the market to-day. (Hague, Hague & Morgan, 2004)
