This may come as a giant shock, but a recent survey done by NPD Group found that teens spent far less cash on music in 2008 than they did in 2007.
U.S. teenagers from the ages of 13-17 took in 19% less music in 2008 than they did the year prior. CD purchasing went down 26% and MP3 download sales dropped 13%. Ironically enough the NPD also said that downloading from file sharing networks was down 6% in 2008 and the number of kids ripping music from friends also was down 28%.
From FMQB:
...32 percent of teens cited discontent with the music available, while 23 percent said they already have a large enough collection of music, and 24 percent cited an overall cutback in entertainment spending."While we expected to see the continued decline in CD purchasing among teens in NPD's music tracking surveys, it was surprising to see that fewer teens downloaded music from P2P sites or borrowed them from friends," said NPD analyst Russ Crupnick.
The overview also displayed a jump in the use of streaming music services such as MySpace and Pandora. Listening or downloading songs on these social networks also went up from 26% in 2007 to 46 percent in 2008.
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