A new study out from the University of Hertforshire discovers the obvious: kids know that piracy is illegal, but they do it anyway. Only one music service can make them go legit: something that provides unlimited, permanent downloads, not just online streams. So why are such services so slow to get off the ground?

Appetite for destruction lots of songs

Kids in the UK certainly keep plenty of music on their personal machines. The survey found that the average user has 17 days' worth of music, and given that appetite for volume, it's no surprise that unlimited download models are popular. What's more surprising is that streaming, which would seem to offer similar benefits, isn't a compelling for-pay proposition among the the young.

UK Music, which paid for the survey, has made both detailed results and a summary of the research available. All told, over 1,800 individuals answered questions, and follow-up interviews were performed with a number of them. The participants are frequently broken down into two groups (14-18 and 19-24) to get a sense for how aging affects the answers.

The data was pretty clear on a number of points. For one, the CD isn't going away; over three quarters of those surveyed said they would continue to buy CDs even if they had access to their ideal download service, and the number of CDs owned actually rose in the last year. There were a variety of reasons for this popularity, from the extras that come with a CD to a sense that it more directly supports the band, but a full 44 percent noted that there was no way a CD could be deleted or deactivated remotely, suggesting that users are very much aware of the cases where companies have planned to pull the plug on DRM servers.

A step down in the musical hierarchy of needs brings us to permanent downloads. These aren't viewed as positively as CDs, but listeners were willing to pay for guaranteed sound quality and freedom from malware. iTunes rules the roost here, with Amazon's service and the local Tesco Digital attracting a bit of attention.

In what's obviously bad news for music streaming services, piracy was the next most popular option. Users want a sense of ownership when it comes to their music, and they want guaranteed access to it. Access to streaming services away from the home was simply considered too unreliable to be a viable option. When at the computer, the survey population did do some streaming, but it largely did so via established social sites, like YouTube and MySpace, rather than a dedicated streaming service like Spotify or Last.fm. Over half of respondents said they would continue to pirate even if they were paying for a streaming service, simply because of the appeal of ownership.

Piracy in general remains very common with this group. They use Limewire to grab singles and some form of BitTorrent for whole albums, but also do a lot of unstructured file sharing, using techniques like swapping commercial CDs, transferring files via Bluetooth and USB flash drives, and using software that extracts the sound track from YouTube videos. They generally know it's wrong, although they have a very confused view of both the legal reasons for that and the legal campaigns against piracy—in general, they feel that since everyone's doing it, the chances of personally winding up on the wrong end of a court case is minimal.

It's not hard to do the math on the motivation for piracy. The average music collection is now over 8,000 tracks, all stored on a computer and parceled out to iPods and cell phones. The vast majority of the survey population spends less than �100 a month on entertainment, and only a quarter of that on music, some of which goes to live performances. There's simply no way of creating a collection of that size on that budget, yet people seem to feel they need the tunes—hence, piracy.

So far, the music industry has largely focused on increasing the deterrents to file sharing, although some artists have found a way to use music sharing as a way of increasing sales, either of their music or related goods, like concert tickets and logo-bearing gear. But the survey shows that users are ready to pay a monthly fee for the equivalent of what they can get via piracy: unlimited downloads of music that they permanently own. A full 85 percent of those surveyed said they're willing to pay for this, and over half said they would stop pirating.

There are some indications that the music business may be ready to give this a try, such as the Choruss program for college campuses and the unlimited download service being readied by the Isle of Man. Some ISPs also hope to get into the game, offering customers access to unlimited music on local servers as part of their monthly Internet bill. But the fact that these are only the first, sporadic attempts to give consumers what they actually want suggests that the music business is still in a period of painful transition.