Millions Delete ALL Music Files?

Honig the Apothecary writes "CNN is reporting that millions of people have deleted all the music files from their computers in a story here. My question is how the hell would they know? Are they substituting "deleted" for the words "disabled sharing with other users"?"

Comments

Correction

[sulli]

RIAA member Time Warner is reporting that millions of people have deleted all the music files from their computers.

Also on the page (I'm not kidding, look yourself):

RELATED
Music swappers sued, amnesty unveiled
Why I've stopped sharing music
Study: CDs may soon go the way of vinyl
12-year-old settles music swap lawsuit
Why suing college students for music downloading is right
Details of RIAA's amnesty program: Musicunited.org

CNN: The Least Trusted Name In News.

Re:What's the difference?

[Mattcelt]

Believe you me, if there was a feasible way for them to do just that, they would. Remember the legislation they were trying to get passed which would allow them to legally hack into people's computers?

Don't ever underestimate greed as a motivating factor.

Re:Lies, damned lies, and dumb polls...

[loginx]

Call me paranoid but I wonder if those 40,000 'volunteers' are even aware that they have agreed to install monitoring software on their computer and that someone is checking everything they do.

I wouldn't even be surprised if the monitoring was handled by Gator :P

Re:Lies, damned lies, and dumb polls...

[laird]

'I wonder if clicking "I Agree" in any of thier software installations made them become "volunteers".'

NPD doesn't sneak software onto people's computers. People on NPD's panels know that they are panelists. They are recruited, surveyed (gender, age, etc.) and qualified into specific surveys, and are compensated for participating in the panels.

Of course, since the panelists know that they're on the panel, NPD has control mechanisms and statistical models to compensate in this surve, as they do when surveying what magazines people read, what food they like, and so on.I don't know the details of their methodology, but their research is trusted in a huge range of consumer surveys, and they've always had good answers to my questions, so my starting assumption is that they did a pretty good job on this survey as well, unless someone picks out specific flaws.