By Charlotta Hedman
What kind of mental picture do you get from the words “music consumer”? Is it a young kid downloading mp3s? Or an indie nerd leafing through vinyls in a record shop? You’re probably imagining someone under the age of 40 and that’s where you’re going wrong.
When the music industry complains about audiences not forking out for music anymore they’re ignoring one part of the demographic, the so called grey music pound. The population of Europe is ageing and the post war baby-boomers are just as keen to listen to music as everyone else. A lot of them don’t have the technical know how of how to use torrents or iPods, but they still want to enjoy music and they have the money to do it.
According to Jerome Taylor in The Independent retirees in the UK spend up to £100bn a year.
But more importantly, today there are more pensioners than children in the UK. According to the Office of National Statistics, the percentage of the population aged 65 and over has increased with 1.7 million people since 1984. If the trend continues that means 22 per cent of the UK population will be over 65 in 2034.
Not only is the country becoming greyer, there’s also a lot of spending power in the 65 to 74 age range. The amount spent by this group on consumer goods is projected to rise from an average of £4,379 a year in 2010 to £6,055 by 2017.
And there’s proof of this on the field. So called heritage acts are still doing amazingly well live. The Rod Stewarts and Rolling Stones of this world will always pull crowds and sell records. Maybe there’s still some life left in the way things used to be done in the music industry. Although according to tech journalist Vic Keegan, the older generations are more tech savvy than we think.
“The Older generation – the post war baby boomers – need no help. Reared on the Sinclair Spectrum and the BBC B they are very techno savvy and heavily into nostalgia making them a sitting duck for exploitation of back catalogues. Really old people won’t have an MP3 player but there is, as always, plenty if free music on the radio.”
Keegan himself uses his “trusty iPod Touch, challenged by a recently arrived iPad, apart of course from the radio”. And radio, he says, “is a technology written off more times than I have changed my mobile phone but enjoying record popularity.”
More and more people are tuning into digital radio on their phones. According to Rajar (Radio Joint Audience Research) 31 percent of adults in the UK have listened to the radio online and 13 percent listen to the radio on their smart phones.
Traditional ways of consuming music are still going strong. The music industry might sometimes be looking too hard at the demographics they’re loosing and not focusing on the audiences that are still there.
