Owen Gibson, media correspondent
Monday May 15, 2006
The Guardian

Women using digital downloads to circumvent intimidating record shop assistants are driving a resurgence in music sales, according to research.
The fifty-quid bloke, the marketing name for middle-aged men credited with boosting record sales by buying piles of CDs, has been superseded by a new breed of female music fans.

The belief that growth in the market was coming from older male fans sparked a rash of magazines aimed at that niche. But research by the media group Emap shows that the huge popularity of MP3 players such as Apple's iPod has now fuelled an increase in sales to women.

The study also shows that the traditional image of the music press as a male preserve has been shattered. More women than men read the rock magazine Kerrang!, for example, and nearly half of those under 30 who buy the the music monthly Q are female. More women now spend more time listening to music than their male counterparts, with record labels speculating that the rise in digital downloads means they now find it quicker and easier to explore new artists.
Being able to sample tracks online also avoids dealing with the breed of snobbish, list-obsessed record shop assistants depicted by Nick Hornby in his novel High Fidelity, later made into a film starring John Cusack.

"The freedom afforded by new technology means that women are now confidently downloading music at home and broadening their musical horizons in private," said Sophie Watson Smyth, marketing manager of Q and the music magazine Mojo.

She dubbed the new breed of technology-savvy female music fans the "MP-she generation" and said recent sales increases for the magazines had been driven by more women turning to them for guidance on what to buy.