Dylan Hunter

About 21 million, or 87% of kids ages 12-17, use the Internet. According to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the Internet have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations. The study considers them "Content Creators."

The results highlight that this is a generation of teens eager to share their thoughts, experiences, and creations with the wider Internet population.

Some key findings of the study include:

* 33% of online teens share their own creative content online, such as artwork, photos, stories or videos
* 32% say that they have created or worked on web pages or blogs for others, including friends or school assignments
* 22% report keeping their own personal webpage
* 19% of online teens keep a blog, and 38% of online teens read blogs
* 19% of internet-using teens say they remix content they find online into their own artistic creations.

Teens are often much more enthusiastic authors and readers of blogs than their adult counterparts. Teen bloggers, led by older girls, are a major part of this tech-savvy cohort. "For American teens, blogs are about self-expression, building relationships, and carving out a presence online," said Amanda Lenhart, co-author of the report entitled, "Teen Content Creators and Consumers."

51% of online teens report downloading music, compared to just 18% of adults who report similar behavior. Mary Madden, a Research Specialist at the Project and co-author of the report, said "At a time when social norms around digital content don’t always appear to conform with the letter of the law, many teens are aware of the restrictions on copyrighted material, but believe it’s still permissible to share some content for free." 75% agree with the statement that, "Music downloading and file-sharing is so easy to do, it’s unrealistic to expect people not to do it."

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Woo-hoo - here’s one for the good guys! I hate these kind of utterly bogus attempts at supporting failing business models through technology, and specifically this kind, where you’re hiring a company specifically to piss off your most avid consumers.

Again, here’s a bizarre idea that I’ve spoken of before - work on correcting the value imbalance, and crap stunts like what this company used to do, (again, hooray!!! ) become unnecessary, (and yes, I’m well-aware that it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to hire a couple of hackers to do this than to address the real issue, but it’s hardly the way to make friends and influence people like - oh - those folks who are your only shot at being able to survive as a business over the long term…).

It’s about time, as The RIAA, etc., keeps working harder and harder to make sure that it keeps killing any services working on what is very much a high-demand service,*1* *2*to see at least the nail driven into the coffin of one of theirs.

It’s funny, but if there were a RIAA for text content owners, there would be no search engines at all, (no Google, no Yahoo) as they all locate content that inherently has all IP rights reserved, (by its very production) and point directly to the most “useful” IP, most often taken out of the context desired by the copyright owner, facilitating _massive_ copyright infringement, while concurrently making money by selling ads around these infringements, and, of course, not sharing a dime of this revenue with the copyright holders of the content itself, (and, in fact, concurrently charges the IP-infringed should they wish to get people to examine their content in its originally-designed context, and for its original purpose). Instead, Search has become a multi-billion dollar industry, with tremendous growth potential, and has become a critical part of all our lives on what could have been entirely snuffed out in the early days of the Web, if the “PublisheRIAA” had been established. And we all would have been… better off therefore?

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*1* Normal folks outside of college campuses won’t be able to use for several years, at least, but some darned fool gives The RIAA access to Internet2, and they promptly work to shut down a file sharing service in its infancy there - i2Hub - read more here

*2* As well as the solutions that these services would drive to the increasingly-problematic bandwidth expenses for individual bloggers / podcasters, etc., (and if you don’t think this is a real issue and hindrance to richer and richer media being created by more and more individuals, go ahead - try producing your own show, and find out the entirely-counter-to-radio economics of doing so, due to both bandwidth expenses and the obscurity of royalty payment schemes, and then tell me that continued work isn’t needed to solve these issues).

And what about VoIP - Skype gets bought out for literally billions of dollars, by providing us the ability to make phone calls anywhere around the world for free, (or, really, rather by making it now included as part of our bandwidth expenses). And where did this technology come from? Yep, some of those “pirates” from Kazaa, (and yes, can still hold them out as laudable for the Kazaa product itself, as I can entirely without conflict consider them scumbags for largely being the naiscent force behind the growth of the spyware industry - tech good, business model bad).

A company that fought net piracy by adding fake files to file-sharing networks is being closed down.

Overpeer led efforts to battle the rising popularity of file-sharing networks such as Kazaa.

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Another good little blip on free music file sharing vs. paid in Europe. The most important part of the article - “Among the 46% of European online 15-24 year olds who use the Internet to consume music….40% do not consider the CD to be a good value for money…”

The RIAA and IFPI can and will*1* continue their campaigns against their members’ most involved consumers, but so long as this situation remains, where consumers feel like they are receiving less value than they are giving up when consuming music, there will continue to be a strong, and well-motivated free file-sharing community.

As someone who’s had to work free-to-consumer business models for years now, there is _absolutely_ no question in my mind, there _is_ some level >0 where the majority of these folks would feel like they were receiving an even exchange for their money, and would indeed pay for it.

Now, I know full well there’s not a chance in hell that the established music industry will engage in the real hard work of trying to figure out how to make this thing work until someone else, (Apple, others) forces them down a path, so, suppose will have to look to keep helping be that force! *2*

More here
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*1* Since that’s effectively their sole purpose in being, and they’re now smelling blood with the horrible recent US Supreme Court Grokster decision

*2* And I know the companies that support the RIAA and IFPI would never in a million years consider this, but it definitely keeps occuring to me - maybe, as multimedia continues to become more and more prominent, music as a fully-independent media vehicle has largely had its run, and it’s time to do something different. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve thought to myself that when I buy a SharkTales or Robots DVD, I think I should be able to bring it with me in the car, load it into my CD player, and get the soundtrack as part of the package. If you want to goose the price of DVD up by, say, $1-2 / unit to pay for that, yeah, I’d go for that, and then you, Music Companies, would get, let’s say, $24 / yr, (presuming one kids’ DVD / mth @ $2 royalty) for someone that otherwise might spend $18, (presuming 2 soundtrack purchases / yr) or a net increase of 33% on Gross Rev, not including the fact that if my kids’ DVD included such soundtrack for that $2, I’d definitely be tempted to buy more of them, (gated, of course, by the quality of the content that the movie industry can come up with, but hey, wouldn’t that be something - two different media divisions of many of the same companies pooling time, effort and resources to actually help develop better content - I know, I know, whoa Boy, what are you thinking? ).

Silent media - long dead.

Black and White media - largely had its run.

Non-HD video media and Non-Interactive media - both have maybe another 10 yrs of life.

It’s time to start not just thinking about, but actually working toward, the kind of much better marriage of value generated vs. cost required that can do away with the horribly conflicted relationship between music companies and their most voracious consumers that exists now, (and then we can all stop wasting our money on the RIAA & IFPI, since it’s _our_ funds that are being used against us).