92% of music listeners list CD as preferred format

Contrary to opinion that the increasing popularity of music downloading will eventually make CD album and single sales obsolete, people still want to own hard-copy music and 92% of people said that CDs are their preferred music format. The latest findings from Entertainment Media Research found that people buy legal downloads when the music they want is not available in-store, or to help them decide whether to buy a CD or not. More than 60% of the 1,400 respondents said that they were likely to use legal music downloading to get hold of tracks because it was not in music stores, and over 50% said that they used legal downloads to get a few tracks from recent albums. Getting hold of music quickly was another strong impetus for the use of music downloading, according to the survey. The CD continues to exert a very powerful emotional hold over legal downloaders. When asked about buying CDs in the future, 80% of the sample claim that they will buy as many or more.