I am always amused by analyst studies. That's because, in a former existence, I worked with analysts. Most were escapees from Big Five consulting companies and others had worked for companies like Gartner and Jupiter that get paid stupendous sums of money to do "research" on various topics.

As one who has "research" published - of the peer-reviewed sort - I had certain expectations on what would be considered "research" in this field. Lord was I ever wrong. "Market research" is a bizarre chimera of surveying, plus semi-educated guesswork and heavy political influence.

So with salt shaker firmly in hand let us turn to the latest pronouncement from these Delphic oracles. Jupiter Research's latest study purports to tell us that subscription services will overtake singles-downloading. They come to this conclusion not based on any actual market research (which would tell them that iTunes has more customers than all subscription services combined) but based on surveys of a couple thousand people, which showed that older folk (over 18s) use subscription services more than teenagers (13-17).

Yes, folks, there you have it. Market research at its best.

The CNET story has a couple of really amusing howlers in it, of which my favorite is this:

Jupiter said the survey also showed that CDs won't be replaced by digital music in the next five years.

Now, last time I looked, the stuff on the CD was... digital music! Yes, really. In fact, the vast majority of the world's music downloaders are downloading music that was moved off of these physical platters. Can someone please explain to CNET and Jupiter that it's all digital? And once they've managed to grasp that concept we can start working on doing meaningful research, instead of issuing idiotic pronouncements. Eventually, some day.

Posted by dr. wex at December 2, 2004 11:03 AM