世論 What Japan Thinks

At the start of May MyVoice surveyed the members of their internet community by means of a private survey regarding portable music players. They got 14,913 valid responses to their internet questionnaire, with 54% of the sample female, 4% in their teens, 21% in their twentiesm 39% in their thirties, 24% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties.

I have a Sony hard disk-based music player on test, but rather than a product review (I’ve mentioned it before myself, and Gen Kanai has a long thread or three on issues with the software) I’ll review myself. Before I got the machine on loan, I hadn’t used a portable player since perhaps my university days.

The first thing I noticed, for perhaps three or four days wearing it on my commute to work, was that the world seemed different; I felt I was stepping back from reality into a little cocoon that shielded me from some of the – well, I don’t really know what, just a transparent bubble that kept everyone else from intruding into my personal aural space, and to some extent my consciousness too. Once these feelings faded – or at least until I assimilated them as a normal commuting state – and as I started loading the player up with a decent amount of music, I noticed I was becoming a very selfish and intolerant listener. Before, I used standard CDs almost exclusively, and even ripped content was played on a per album basis, and I’d often keep the same album loaded up for days if not weeks at a time, playing it over and over. Now, with 300 tracks at my fingertips I find myself hitting the Next Track button an awful lot, tracks get marked down on a whim, and I find myself seeking out my favourites far too often. Part can be attributed to a lack of functionality in the software on the player; I’d love an enhanced random shuffle mode that took into account rating when selecting what to play so I’d only hear my one star tracks once in a blue moon, and skipping a track before getting past the intro downrates it a bit.

I think I should get rid of the player before it destroys my sense of musical appreciation completely, and buy a 128Mb player that I can only load one or two albums at a time onto. Yes, I’ll never listen to music on that player again.

Meanwhile, back at the survey, the Japanese people had this to say about the matter.
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goo Research recently published the results of some detailed investigation into the use of portable music players. Over four days at the end of March they interviewd by means of a private internet questionnaire 2,183 members of their monitor group. The respondents were 48.2% male, with 19.1% in their teens, 17.5% in their twenties, 19.7% in their thirties, 21.2% in their forties, 16.6% in their fifties, 4.8% in their sixties, and 1.2% seventy years old or more.

Note that MP3 player refers to either memory based or hard-disk based players only like iPods or D-Snaps, not CD players that support MP3 file formats. I am not sure under what category phones with music playback support are recorded; perhaps they are “Other”?

I’ve recently been testing a Sony NW-A3000 but I couldn’t really recommend it to anyone. The 20 Gb hard disk is nice, of course, but the PC-based software is unwieldy to say the least, as is the player software. Pet hates include that random shuffle seems not as random as it should be, doing Pause then Play will result in a one-second or so skip, and recharging the player resets the player back to the first track. I’ve heard that the iPod balances out the volume, but the Sony doesn’t, so I have to keep fiddling with the sound levels. On the other hand, I did manage to find an almost complete archive of Just A Minute, but on the downside I perhaps scare the other train passengers as I try to stifle laughs during my commute.
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japan.internet.com and goo Research recently performed a survey to see what brands sprung to mind when various products were mentioned. They questioned 1,084 people from goo’s pool of monitors, 42.53% male, 57.47% female, with 66.14% aged from 10 (well, it’s actually from 15, as that’s the minimum age for joining the goo Research monitor group) to 39, and 33.86% aged from 40 to 69.

As a slight digression, the original story did have these percentages to two decimal places, which seems an unnecessarily high degree of accuracy. Since the sample size is 1,084 people, one person equates to just over 0.09% of the sample, therefore quoting the percentages to two decimal places implies more accuracy than is possible from the sample size.

As a second slight digression, I’ve been a bit disappointed by goo Research recently – their main research results index now mostly points to japan.internet.com stories which only report a handful of the highlights from their survey, rather than the full gory details. Perhaps for you as a reader the short sharp story is easier to digest, but for me, often the juicer statistics are glossed over.

Note that this questionnaire is related to brand awareness, not actual sales figures, which often differ quite greatly from the numbers presented below; Matsushita/Viera is number one in terms of sales of flat screen TVs in Japan, USA and Europe, for instance.
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MyVoice conducted a survey into the use of MP3 players, especially in relation to Podcasting amongst 15,525 members (60% female) of their MyVoice community at the start of November.

I’m not much of a Podcast fan myself (although I have an idea for one for here…) nor a portable player owner, so I have never got into the whole idea at all, so I suppose I’m glad to see that four in five are in some degree of ignorance of the whole subject, and, barely four in one hundred have actually listened to one! Comparing the figures for Japan with those for other countries may be an interesting line of research, however, which I should do sometime soon. In fact, I am thinking of writing a regular column on survey analysis, so watch this space to see what develops.
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infoPLANT performed a survey regarding the purchase and ownership of hard disk-based portable audio players. Not too suprisingly, along with Apple, Sony came out rather well. I always find the huge positive image of Sony rather depressing, as outside the PSP and PS2, most of their stuff is pretty much average quality or worse (and I’ve heard the PSP and PS2s aren’t much better) and overpriced, yet everyone loves them. Not that this is purely a Japanese trait – even the tough crowd over in Slashdot give Sony an easy time on the whole, regardless of Sony’s embrace of DRM, closed systems, and the recent rootkit fiasco.

infoPLANT surveyed 8,615 people, 35.5% male, over one week at the start of October. The respondents to the survey were self-selecting, choosing to fill in a questionnaire presented within the iMode menu system.

Q1: Do you have a hard disk-based portable audio player? (Sample size=8,615)

Yes	15.4%
No	84.6%

For males, three in ten teenagers have them, decreasing to less than one in ten for those over fifty, but for females, over one in five of the over-fifties sample owned one, exceeding the teenagers in second place by 0.2%! The sample in their thirties had the lowest ownership figures, with only 11.5% owning one. The reason for this interesting data is not mentioned.
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Found this survey at BizMarketing regarding portable music players. The fieldwork was carried out over the Internet by members of BizMarketing Survey (must look into that to see if there’s free money for taking surveys!) from April 27th to May 9th of this year, with 4,279 respondents.

Q1: What brand first comes to mind when thinking of portable music
players?

iPod	72.6%
Walkman	9.1%
Other (or none)	18.3%

Q2: What type of portable music player do you use the most?

MD player	40.8%
CD player	28.0%
iPod series	13.4%
Other hard disk or flash memory player	17.8%

Q3: When you bought your portable music player (or when you will buy) what are the (up to) 3 most important things?

Price	61.0%
Size/weight	43.2%
Design	31.5%
Audio quality	27.0%
Maker/brand	25.6%
Usability	23.9%
Can record lots of of tracks	15.6%
Long playback time	12.8%
Type of recording media	11.2%
Features other than music	2.7%
Others	2.1%

Q4: What features of the new Sony Network Walkman NW-HD5 are attractive to you? (Select up to 3)

Can record lots of of tracks	51.1%
Long playback time	39.9%
Maker/brand	31.4%
Size/weight	22.0%