Music lovers and social networking: surveys suggest a connection between users tweeting-about & trying-out tracks and buying them.

This week a report released from NPD Group shows that one third of Twitter members bought a CD in the previous three months, and one-third bought an mp3—figures that are significantly higher than for the online-but-non-tweeting among us.

Fast Company blogger Kit Eaton reflected on the findings, commenting on what appears to be a halo effect, whereby tweets emanating from within your social network about favorite and emerging music leads to increased sales—also known as the “trusted referral” model of social media marketing.

Although he does not mention it, Eaton’s comments are connected to the popular #MusicMonday hashtag ritual on Twitter, when music lovers tweetout links to the tunes they love–often pointing to YouTube, but increasingly directing followers to other music sharing twitter apps (the top ten of which, according to Mashable, are reviewed here).

“It’s possible that people who Twitter are just generally more social people, who may be inclined to buy more music,” Eaton speculates, noting that this phenomenon isn’t likely specific to Twitter, since music news sharing is obviously part of the network effect on MySpace, Facebook and other social media sites.

But it is true that in a general sense, media use begets media use. And in terms of music, research shows that when listeners can try before they buy the result is they often do in fact buy (and as Adam Ostrow pointed out on Mashable, this is a key argument used by supporters of filesharing music sites like Pirate Bay). A 2009 European study interviewed 2000 people over the age of 15 and found that people “who download music illegally are also 10 times more likely to pay for songs than those who don’t.” And for retailers, the music sampling model makes good business sense, according to new research in The International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising. There researchers found that “longer, higher quality free music samples engage more listeners and reduce the number of ‘free riders’… making it more likely that the fan will buy the full product, whether that’s a CD or a track download.”

In a related vein, last year an NPD study on digital entertainment habits in the US found links between gaming and music consumption when they surveyed casual gamers who said they sometimes buy tunes they discover while playing Rock Band or Guitar Hero. Similar to the Twitter phenomenon then, in their gaming poll NPD found that playing music titles frequently leads to “music discovery” which can trigger a digital-music or CD purchase—a cause-effect trend we will see in September when Beatles Rock Band debuts.

Of course music use habits, like all media use, is generationally unique. In the post-Napster era (also known as the “download decade”) sharing music is one thing, and paying for it is another. The NPD report shows that Tweeters do quite a lot of the latter: they buy more music than non-Tweeters, which doesn’t necessarily mean they consume more of it, but they are willing to fork over more cash for digital music.

When NPD compared the music-buying habits of Tweeters with web-users who are non-tweeters, an interesting gap appeared. In the last 90 days, twice as many Tweeters purchased a digital download as did nonTweeters (34% vs. 16%, respectively). And when folks do buy mp3s, the Tweeters invest far more money than the nonTweeters: a whopping 77% more on average in fact, NPD reports.

The demographics of Twitter certainly predict these trends in music-buying: while young people have always been the biggest music consumers and now downloaders (according to data from Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2009), few millennials are on Twitter—a recent study confirms that only 22% of them use it. It’s those 40- and 50-somethings who make up the highest-indexing age group on Twitter, and older people are more likely to pay for the music they download. This generational divide in attitudes toward digital media in general and the music industry in particular, P2P file sharing, DRM and copyright are covered in a truly excellent series of articles in The Globe and Mail.

Back on Twitter, fittingly, many members are calling for the dedication of this week’s #MusicMonday to Michael Jackson (hashtag: #michaelmonday). In the wake of his untimely death this past week, sales of his music have topped the charts, with Thriller as the number one seller on iTunes and Jackson’s oeuvre accounting for 60% of all music sales at Amazon.com on Friday.

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