Share, Steal, or Buy? A Social Cognitive Perspective of Music Downloading

The music downloading phenomenon presents a unique opportunity to examine normative influences on media consumption behavior. Downloaders face moral, legal, and ethical quandaries that can be conceptualized as normative influences within the self-regulatory mechanism of social cognitive theory. The music industry hopes to eliminate illegal file sharing and to divert illegal downloaders to pay services by asserting normative influence through selective prosecutions and public information campaigns. However the deficient self-regulation of downloaders counters these efforts maintaining file sharing as a persistent habit that defies attempts to establish normative control. The present research tests and extends the social cognitive theory of downloading on a sample of college students. The expected outcomes of downloading behavior and deficient self-regulation of that behavior were found to be important determinants of intentions to continue downloading. Consistent with social cognitive theory but in contrast to the theory of planned behavior, it was found that descriptive and prescriptive norms influenced deficient self-regulation but had no direct impact on behavioral intentions. Downloading intentions also had no direct relationship to either compact disc purchases or to subscription to online pay music services.