How Morgan Got It Wrong on Kids and Media

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He says most have "never" bought a CD—but there are always hundreds of CDs on sale at the stores, so I'm sure lots of teenagers have bought a few on occasion. He also says 80% of teens download music illegally from file-sharing sites and that the Apple (AAPL) iTunes Music Store is "unpopular with many teenagers because of the 'high price' (79p per song)." (That's about $1.30.) While I'm sure many kids can't afford to buy many songs, my friends and I use iTunes a lot and give each other iTunes gift vouchers as presents on birthdays or at the holidays.

Agreement on Twitter

The only thing I completely agreed with is what Matthew wrote about Twitter. Twitter currently has lots of media hype and publicity, so lots of teenagers sign up and use it constantly for about a week, regularly updating profiles with information nobody really cares about. (Personally, I enjoyed following a person known as "FunnyJoker," who posted hilarious quotes and jokes whenever he remembered them.) But my sense is that after about a week, a lot of teenagers realize that nobody is reading their tweets. As Matthew put it, "Tweets are pointless." For this reason, Facebook is infinitely more important in the life of a teenager—and the majority of us would give the exact same answer if we were asked.

Which brings me to my final point. I don't mean to be disrespectful to Matthew. We're both teenage interns who got the chance to publish our opinions about media. My bigger problem is with Morgan Stanley, which was irresponsible to pass off the views of one kid as the opinion of an entire generation. If Morgan Stanley wanted to tap into the teen mindset, it should have asked lots of people from different backgrounds. After all, I may disagree with Matthew on much of what he said, but lots of other people will disagree with me.

Benjamin Montague is an intern in BusinessWeek's London bureau.

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