India Broadband Forum

India Broadband

Earlier this week the NPD Group came up with research that showed that fans of hip-hop and urban music were proportionately more likely to illegally swap downloaded files than devotees of other music styles.

While urban music fans were estimated to constitute 30 percent of paid downloads and 19 percent of physical CD sales in April, this constituency was deemed responsible for 49 percent of illegal P2P sharing.

Pundits may wish to analyze what this means. Could this be that hip-hop and urban music fans are younger and more comfortable with technology, or could this mean that the type of fans who flock to a musical style that frequently chronicles over-the-top behavior be more willing to commit their own illegality than fans of music with less of an emphasis on violence, guns, ho's, etc? And please. This is a youth-wide phenomenon. Step off, haters.

That debate, frankly,is best left for others. But what is really interesting to me is that in the illegal P2P demographic you have a constituency that is comfortable with P2P technology, and loves pimped-out mobile gadgetry too.

So isn't the hip-hop crowd a promising new marketing opportunity for PC-based and especially,mobile VoIP? Why aren't the VoIP handset makers and service providers focusing on this segment to the degree they should?