Jun. 30, 2010 - Issue #767: The Bestest of Edmonton 2010

Enter Sandor

Not just a boys’ club

Women buy music instead of downloading

Back in the early '90s, when my record-collecting geekdom was at its height, there was something you couldn't help but notice at each and every indie record shop I went into.

Guys outnumbered girls at about the same clip you'd see at Rush shows, comic conventions and Star Trek movie premieres.

Record collecting was a guy thing. All the people I knew who were into buying Sub Pop rarities or making sure to buy an English import version of the latest Manchester-band release before it came out domestically were, well, dudes.

Sausage parties. And, if you took out some of the record-shop clerks, the male-to-female ratio was increased all that much more.

Heck, we used to joke—my record-collecting geek friends and I, that is—that a woman's record collection was large if it took up more than a single shelf.

It was a divide. Heck, in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, a book about relationships and record-collecting geeks, he makes it pretty clear that obsessing about boxes and boxes worth of vinyl and CDs is, well, a guy thing.

So, being a thirtysomething man, I was surprised to read stats recently released by the BPI (British Recorded Music Industry). They showed that in 2009, the biggest consumers of recorded music were thirtysomething women.

"It (the BPI Statistical Handbook 2010) found that 43.1 percent of the population aged over 12 made at least one music purchase in 2009, roughly the same as 2008," read the BPI's overview. "Women in their thirties are the most active consumers of music, with 57.5 percent having made some kind of purchase in 2009."

Now, if the British numbers hold true across the board, if those demographics are roughly the same in Canada and the United States, then it means the women of my generation, the ones who weren't part of our record-collecting fraternity when we were in our early 20s, are now the key demographic for the recording industry. Not teens. Not hipsters. Not gadget obsessed single men.

So the question is: why is this demographic so strong?

The answer, likely, is one of morality.

I point to a University of Cape Town study, performed by Jean-Paul Van Belle, Brandan Macdonald and David Wilson. It looked at the attitudes that influence the desire to pirate copyrighted material. It found there was a significant difference between men and women when it comes to illegally file-shared music.

"[A] significant gap between males and females is in the music scenario where eight percent of males would probably not pirate compared 18 percent of females who would probably not pirate," reads the study's findings.

Now, if twice as many women as men have sworn off pirating music, it also means women are more likely to pay for music than men. And once people get into their 30s, they usually have more disposable income than they did in their 20s, so, combine morality with money, and you have the female, aged 30 – 39—the target market for the music industry.

For the record, I buy more music than my wife does. But she had a pretty large vinyl collection that she brought into the relationship. Yes, we're both record-collecting geeks.

She's also got a real good grip of Arsenal's starting 11 and the Major League Soccer schedule.

She even claims to like Star Trek, but I get the feeling she can't name one single rule of acquisition. So I've still got something that's my own — all geeky and male. V

Steven Sandor is a former editor-in-chief of Vue Weekly, now an editor and author living in Toronto.
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