Tracking musical expenditure: January

This is the fifth monthly installment in a yearlong project to monitor the amount of cash I have spent on music and music-related activities. In case this is the first time you've stumbled across this blog then the inspiration behind this series of posts was a report (.ppt) published by the UK-based think tank, Demos, which stated that file-sharers typically spent more money (£77 per year) on music than non-filesharers (£33). The suggestion here is that pirates are the best customers, or at the very least are the ones willing to part with the most cash.

January was a busy month for me. It was filled with quite a few purchases of 'old' music media (ie CDs) - well a few by my standards at least - and a few live concert ticket purchases. In total £119.66 was spent on music and music-related activities. The latter category includes any money that was spent on the back of music purchases, like concert merchandise and/or refreshments that would not otherwise have been purchased were it not for the musical event. This brings the running total to date up to £942.10.

Going back to the music purchases, out of that £119.66 only £36.81 was spent on music (ie singles, albums, etc). The bulk of the money was spent on live concerts and tickets. Also, some of the music purchases included non-traditional music media such as video game downloads for the Guitar Hero series. If I strip down the sales to money spent on what we would classify as chart eligible singles and album the monthly expenditure comes down to a more meager £25.96 - all of which was spent on buying both the Vampire Weekend albums twice (to give as gifts). That brings the money spent on albums and singles (the measure in the Demos report) in at £80.24

I have to admit that I did not expect to reach and surpass the figure that Demos placed as the average spent by pirates after only 5 months. There's still a long way to go in this experiment, but one thing seems to be sure and that is this music lover still contributes to the musical economy.

And did I fail to mention that Massive Attack have an album out in February? There's at least one purchase for next month.

As usual, you can see a detailed breakdown of expenditure here.