75% of Students Prefer Downloading Music To Streaming

A study by the University of Reading has found that 75% of college students prefer downloading their music to hard drives or MP3 players as opposed to streaming it using new sites such as Lala.

I have been playing around with Lala for the past few days and it is pretty cool concept.  It allows users to stream any of Lala's 7 million songs once for free, and for as many times as they would like for as little as ten cents.

When a song is "streamed" as opposed to being downloaded, the listener must be connected to the internet to play their song, and the song cannot be transferred to an MP3 player.  If a music listener mainly listens to music on an internet-connected computer and doesn't have an MP3 player, however, a service like Lala would be great way to save money on music purchases.

I'm not surprised, though that most college students prefer to download music.  It wouldn't be worth 10 cents to me to listen to a song that I can only listen to on my computer.  I listen to a significant amount of music on my computer, but I really like also having my music on my iPhone.  Plus, if a service like Lala is discontinued, a user is likely to lose all of the music that they have purchased.

The availability of songs that can be streamed for free on YouTube also makes paying for streaming music on sites like Lala less attractive.  The quality doesn't always match Lala's, and many songs on YouTube are uploaded illegally, but many songs have official, high-quality music videos uploaded by record labels or artists and that can be played an unlimited number of times for free.  I have noticed that many students ignore the video portion of music videos on YouTube and simply listen to the music while browsing another website.

Source: Yahoo Finance
Image: LaLa

Apple Uses Windows 7 Google Searches to Promote Macintosh Computers

Apple has taken out Google Adwords related to Windows 7 so that when a user of Google does a search for Windows 7-related keywords, ads are displayed encouraging the searcher to purchase an Apple computer. 

In working with novice computer users for a number of years, I have noticed that Google Ads really work because many people do not even notice that they are advertisements, but think instead that they are actual search results.  I think that this marketing is brilliant on the part of Apple and that it may persuade some people thinking of upgrading to Windows 7 to instead get a Mac.

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