On Audiophiles

First, I think we need to redefine who we're looking at when we say "audiophiles". My gut tells me that we should really be focusing on "music consumers" since audiophiles are a subset of music consumers but not all music consumers are audiophiles. Audiophiles are technically defined as people who desire a greater quality of sound from their stereo system. Whereas "music consumers" read magazines such as Spin, Rolling Stone, and other publications "audiophiles" browse more technical fare such as Audiophilia.com (sexy name ain't it?) and Stereophile Magazine which both focus on high end stereo equipment and comparing the finer points of speaker wire gauges.

That being said, the music consumer demographic is more geared towards actual music and musical genres than the technical side of things and these are the people we want to reach with our product. After some preliminary research I found a useful website called Swivel.com which combines the excruciatingly fun activity of making statistical graphs with the power of Web 2.0. The first useful graph I found had to do with ages of music consumers:



As we can see, the older generation takes the cake when it comes to buying music. Younger consumers make up maybe 15% of the total sample whereas older consumers make up more than 30%, especially in the past 5 years. This probably has to do with the popularity of online downloads and older internet user's inability to figure out Bittorrent. Older consumers also have more disposable income than younger consumers which would mean they can afford to purchase more.

Another graph, the popularity of musical genres over time, confirms that the most popular genre out there, among music consumers, has been and will always be Rock n Roll. Again, since older consumers are making up most of the purchasing power involved in the graph and since they're more familiar with more dated bands and artists, the popularity of the Rock genre is no surprise.



Anyone else find any good resources for this type of data?