Youthography (youthography.com), a Toronto-based young consumer marketing and communications consultancy, says its 2005 poll found that nine out of 10 teens and young adults download and that MP3 downloading is the most prevalent reason given for doing so. That is consistent with what the company found in 2003, although at that time only 15% of youth had portable MP3 players so most were downloading the songs to computers. In just two years the percentage of young consumers with MP3s grew to 50% with 72% of teens downloading 1 to 20 songs each week. MP3s were strongest with the 14 to 29 demo – females, 63.6% and males, 66.5% – while downloading of games was heaviest amongst those aged 9 to 13. Pictures, games, movie trailers, TV shows and commercials were on the list of content that teens and young adults were downloading.
Although downloads of sexually explicit material was virtually non-existent amongst 9 to 13 year olds and females 14 to 29, it accounted for 27.1% of the material downloaded by males aged 14 to 29. Youthography conducts a national survey of over 1500 Canadians aged 9 to 29 and puts its findings into Ping, a quarterly publication highlighting major developing trends within the Canadian youth culture.
