MP3 Questionaire

My MP3.com starting up It looks like MP3 and Napster will charge something like $50 a year to download MP3s (however, it’s supposed to be for music you already own). I’d like to know what you think about
this, and so far, I’ve gotten some excellent responses that have made me think twice about some things. If you could send me an email answering the following, I’d appreciate this.

The questions:

1) How old are you?

2) Would you be willing to pay to download all the legal MP3s you want?

3) If you are, what would be the most you’d be willing to pay?

4) If you aren’t, why don’t you think you should? Isn’t it like going to the CD store and taking some of those? Or do you think it’s like something else?

5) If you aren’t, if a few people you know started getting arrested for downloading non-legal MP3s, would that change your mind? Would you just stop downloading them, or just keep doing what you’re doing?

6) If you aren’t, if getting good MP3s started getting a lot harder than it is now, would that change your mind? Would you just stop downloading them, or would you just keep doing what you’re doing?

Update (couple more questions based on what I’ve seen):

7) Roughly what proportion of the MP3s you download do you end up hanging on to (i.e. you burn them, or they won’t get deleted in your next hard drive cleanup)?

8) Of those you hang on to, how many of them are songs by artists for which you’d never buy the CD because you only like a couple songs from them? If you could buy CD-quality singles of these songs for a dollar or two, or say, a collection of your favorite songs for the price of a normal CD, would you be more likely to buy them?

9) Would you be willing to pay an artist directly for a song or album? How much would you be willing to pay for a song you really liked in MP3 format? Higher-quality audio?

10) Alternatively, would you be willing to pay, say, fifty cents extra per blank CD, the money going to the recording companies, in return for perfectly legal MP3 (or better quality) downloads from those companies, with some provision made for artists to collect based on the number of downloads?

I’ll publish a selection of responses in a few days. No names will be used. After I get the comments, I’m deleting the emails, and wiping the hard drive. Ed

Email Ed