Introduction

Like other creative forces in the music industry, Warner Communications Inc. (WCI) has been concerned with the rapid growth in home taping. In the recent past consumers could hear "what they wanted, when they wanted" only by purchasing a record or prerecorded tape. However, the marketing of inexpensive home recording equipment and blank audio tapes (primarily from foreign sources) has provided millions of people with an alternate way of bringing music and other professional entertainment into their homes. This means that by purchasing a tape recorder and blank tapes, a consumer can copy the works of artists, publishers, authors, composers, musicians, producers and recording companies without obtaining their permission or providing them with any compensation at all.

While some technological advances in professional sound recording have benefited the industry, we believe that home taping is causing serious harm to the industry including the many people who contribute to, work in, or otherwise participate in the creation, production and distribution of records and prerecorded tapes. At the present time more recorded music is finding its way into more homes than ever before; yet the creative talent is not sharing in this growth. At a time when demographic and market analyses suggest that there should be continued growth in the number of buyers of prerecorded music, there has actually been a decrease in the percent of the U.S. population purchasing records and prerecorded tapes. In marked contrast, the percent of the population engaging in home taping has significantly increased. Given these competing trends, we at WCI felt it important to obtain valid and reliable data on the nature and extent of home taping.

As a part of its continuing effort to develop better demographic and other marketing information about the domestic prerecorded music industry, WCI has underwritten the two most thorough, in-depth studies of the industry ever conducted. Unprecedented in scope, these studies have served to disprove many of the

myths surrounding the prerecorded music consumer. In addition, they have identified new markets for prerecorded product and have helped to launch the industrywide "Give the Gift of Music" campaign. While our first study was directed primarily at obtaining data concerning the fundamental characteristics of the prerecorded music consumer, 1 our second study was designed to trace changes in the consumer that had taken place between 1977 and 1980, and to explore many other aspects of the industry. 2

One such aspect was home taping. Among other things, we wished to determine how many people tape-record Music and other professional entertainment. Who are these tapers and what do they tape? How much money is spent on blank tapes that are used to record music? What is the market value of the material they record? What are the reasons for taping? To answer these and other questions, WCI dedicated a substantial portion of its 1980 nationwide consumer survey to home taping.

This report will describe the results of the home taping study. It will show that during the 1980 survey year, over $600 million worth of blank tape was used by some 39 million people to bring over $2.85 billion worth of music (and other professional entertainment) into their homes. In addition, it will show that the bulk of these people are neither teenagers nor the economically disadvantaged. Instead they are primarily young adults (between 20 and 34 years of age) with high levels of education and family income. It will also show that the most frequent reason they give for taping is "so I don't have to buy it," and the majority of the music copied is taped from borrowed materials or broadcast performances.

Were home taping not possible, tapers would be spending hundreds of millions of additional dollars on records and prerecorded tapes.

1M Kapp and M. Fishbein, "The Prerecorded Music Market An Industry Survey, WCI, March, 1978.

"M Kapp. S Middlestadt and M. Fishbein The Prerecorded Music Market: A Consumer Survey-1980. WCI, April 1981

Methodology

The data presented in this report are primarily based on 2,370 face-to-face interviews conducted in May and June of 1980. In a few places comparisons are made to data from 3,385 face-to-face interviews conducted in April and May of 1977. Respondents for both surveys were selected on the basis of a customized multi-stage stratified area probability sample encompassing the universe of all private households in the conterminous United States. The details of the sampling plan and the weighting model used to project the sample data to the U.S. population (age 10 and over) can be found in the Appendix.

In both the 1977 and 1980 sampling design, all field work, coding and key punching of the data were carried out under the direction of National Analysts, a division of Booz, Allen & Hamilton, Inc. The questionnaires were developed by Dr. Martin Fishbein (Professor of Psychology and Research Professor, Institute of Communication Research, University of Illinois) and Mr. Michael Kapp (President, Warner Special Products). Data analyses were conducted under the supervision of Dr. Fishbein and Dr. Susan E. Middlestadt (Research Director, Attitude & Behavior Research, Inc.). Dr. Fishbein, Dr. Middlestadt and Mr. Kapp were responsible for the preparation of this report.

Previous research has consistently shown that there is an enormous amount of home taping which causes the industry considerable harm. However, a review of this research revealed that the home taping question had been addressed in many ways. While some studies were based on buyers of blank tape, others were based on respondents who were home tapers. Similarly, while some researchers selected samples that were projectable to the U.S. population, others interviewed only those people living in homes with tape playback and/or recording equipment. Further, while some studies analyzed the number of blank tapes purchased, some focused on the amount of time spent taping, and still others were concerned with the number of albums or individual selections taped. Given these different samples of respondents and different methodologies, it is not surprising that specific findings about the nature and extent of home taping have often differed.

Because of these differences among previous studies, the 1980 WCI questionnaire addressed all aspects of home taping. More specifically, the questionnaire included approximately 100 questions covering blank tape buying and taping behavior. In many cases, the same behavior was described with several questions or combinations of questions. For example, respondents were not only asked to indicate their purchase and use of blank audio tapes, but they were asked to report the amount of time they spent in various taping activities and to report (in units) the amount of copying they had done.

Thus the 1980 questionnaire was designed to permit internal consistency checks for much of the data. For example, the proportion of time spent in copying music could be compared with the proportion of blank tapes used for this purpose. Similarly, we could determine whether the amount of time spent in taping complete albums was related to the number of complete albums that were copied. Not only have these comparative analyses enabled us to investigate the ways in which different measures of taping behavior are related, but they have provided strong evidence for the reliability and validity of the findings.

Findings Part I

Changes in Home Taping From 1977 to 1980

Although the 1977 WCI survey focused on the consumer of prerecorded music, it included three questions of direct relevance to home taping: specifically, in 1977, 1) all respondents were asked to describe the tape players or recorders that they or other members of their household currently owned; 2) those with access to recording equipment (i.e., who lived in households containing at least one tape recorder) were asked if they had ever taped music; and 3) all respondents were asked if they had ever purchased blank audio tape either for their own use or to give to someone else.

In the Introduction to this report we asserted that there has been growth in home taping. This section will document this increase. It will be seen that from 1977 to 1980 there were clear increases in the percent of the population who have access to recording equipment, who have ever bought blank tape and (among those who have access to equipment) who have ever taped music.

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