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Men Spend More on Video Games Than Music
Jakob Paulsen writes "According to research group Nielsen Entertainment, men now spend more money on buying games than on buying music. This adds further credit to the general belief that video games are displacing other forms of media for the attention of young men. Nielsen base their findings on interviews with 1,500 people in January and February."
I think this is more of a product of men being more capable of pirating music than of pirating games as emulation of current consoles is hardly a replacement for the real thing.
Duh. For every game I buy I'd have to buy 4 albums to spend an equal amount of money on music.
It's like saying that people spend more money on their house than on their car. It doesn't mean that they'll own more houses than cars in their lifetime, it just means that houses are more expensive.
Eh.
/me laughs at the thought of actually paying for music anymore.
For the most part, games have a lot more entertainment value for the money. If I buy a CD I'm paying $20 for about an hour's worth of music (not to mention that there may only be a few good songs on it). If I buy a game, There should be at least a few hours worth of gameplay before I beat it, and most games have a multiplayer mode which means that i'll get a lot of play out of that $50 I paid for the game before I get bored with it and need a new toy :). It's simple economics really. Why pay $20 for (at best) an hour of entertainment when you could get an insanely large number of hours of fun out of a $50 game?
It's not really fair to use money as a basis for this. Games tend to cost 3 to 5 times as much as a music CD so it's no shock guys are spending more money on games as games can make more money while still selling less units.
Where do all the people who bought Donkey Konga fit into all of this?
Oh wait a minute... nobody bought Donkey Konga.
No you wouldn't. A thief is a thief.
Bring on the "flame" mods. But I think this is "insightful".
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
New music CD = $28.99
New videogame = $49.99
Do the math...
Behold, another webcomic!
Gender: Male
Time I spend listening to music per week: 0 Seconds
Time I spend playing video games per week: More than 0 Seconds
That was easy.
I don't pirate any music because it isn't worth the albeit slim possibility of a lawsuit for way the heck more money than that music is possibly worth to me. As a result, I don't try out new music the way I used to when my *ahem* "friend" in college who pirated lots of music was around, and thus I don't find out about any music to go and buy. Thus, any non-zero video game spending > my music expenses.
I think the total amount of music I bought since 2002 has been about 3 cds. I average about 1 new game every 2 months. I don't buy games when they first come out because 50 dollars is way to much. You can buy a quality game for 20-30 bucks and the entertainment time for any given game is at least 10-15 hours. Unless I really like a cd (which has about an hours worth of music), I usually listen to a cd 3 to 4 times and then put it away in my collection. I'll listen to it maybe a couple of times a year after that. I think entertainment wise videogames give you more bang for the buck.
-Dipster
I used to buy something like 3 or 4 CDs a week, back in hayday of Napster, mainly because I was exposed to new artists I hadn't heard before at 0 cost, after which I would buy other CDs of them. After Napster was shutdown, that dropped to about 2 CDs a month, at the most. Once the RIAA started suing individuals, I decided I was not going to buy any CDs any more, and have bought 1 CD direct from the artist in the last 2 years. I have spent WAY more than that on games. I buy more games than I do CDs, just volume wise, not even counting the price differential. Most of my friends also don't buy much as far as CDs are concerned, albeit for most of them its not on principle.
Non-RIAA music I've downloaded: Mostly stuff from http://www.ocremix.org/
Except that everything on ocremix.org is probably considered pirated because they don't pay the royalty of up to 8.5 cents per downloaded track to the video game publishers, who own copyright in the musical works that underlie the recordings available on ocremix.org.
Time I spend listening to music per week: 0 Seconds
Are you trying to tell me you didn't buy food in the past week? Most grocery stores have some sort of music playing over the speaker system. The royalties for such music ultimately come out of the price of the groceries you bought. Therefore, you indirectly paid to hear music.
Clearly, this is the work of internet piracy in a post-9/11 world. We will now sue people for not buying music.
Last year in music, I bought 6 CD's (around $15 per) and about 100 iTunes. Let's round that up to $200 to make it easy.
Last year in games, I bought World of Warcraft ($50) and a 3-month pre-paid card ($45). Let's round that up to $100.
MORTAR COMBAT!
I will vouch for that
back when computer games just had simple sound effects that played through the pc speaker, I'd listen to lots of music while I played. Nowdays the gameplay relies on your being able to hear the audio of the game, and I listen to less music.
I'm a 25 year old male and I feel that the recording industry has mostly ignored my musical tastes for about six or seven years now. Last year I bought 1 album (Bowling for Soup). I bought 2 albums 2 years ago, but they were both older music (Talking Heads and Human League).
There are very few newer bands that I like. The older bands I like are not producing new music that I enjoy. Also, when new music comes out that I do enjoy, it gets VERY little radio play in my city. I end up finding songs I like in movies nowadays far more often than I find them on the radio.
If the recording industry wants my money, they're actually going to have to do their job. They need to release music I like and find a way to get me some exposure to the music so that I know it exists. That is what they're there for.