Mac Users More Likely To Purchase Music

Full disclosure: I am a die-hard Mac user since 1992, and am completely addicted to iTunes, my iPod and the iStore. But even I was a little surprised by this story from Apple Insider stating Mac users are much more likely to legally download music, purchase physical CDs, listen to music on their computers and upload music to an MP3 player.

I've worked with plenty of people who downloaded gigs of MP3s every month, and treated that mass of music like some sort of commodity or badge of honour, while not knowing 90 per cent of the music in there. These are the same people who would never dream of actually buying a CD. I've just never made the connection that these people were all PC users.

I've also met people who are intensely passionate about music and used downloading as a means to "try before they buy" or locate unavailable tracks or live recordings. As I'm thinking about it now, a large percentage of those people were Mac users.

I'm wondering where the Linux users fall. ;-)

But I still don't know if I 100 per cent agree with what the research alludes to: that Mac users are honest and PC users are not. Oddly enough, there's a culture of downloading surrounding PC users -- I'm regularly offered copies of Windows operating systems, expensive graphic design software programs, video games and more when I'm working among PC IT folk. I've only been offered one pirate copy of Mac software, and that was from a PC user. Mac users would tell me to go buy my own.

Beyond that culture though, there's simply the fact iTunes and iPod were built to work with the Mac machine. Everything was carefully designed to integrate perfectly with Mac computers and Mac users took to it instantly, largely because there were few other choices. As time went on, the product was tweaked more and more in the interests of Mac users, and then simply ported to Windows.

I've used iTunes on both Mac and Windows machines. There's no contest; the experience is lost on a PC. The iPod is the same thing - it functions on a PC and gets the job done, but on a Mac it's a key part of your music collection.

Since Apple is dominating both the digital music sales and the digital players sales, it makes perfect sense the stats would skew toward Mac users.