Downtown resident Diana Priddy, 32, falls into that category. The nursing student buys music by the song online and physically on a full CD - but relies on a trusted adviser (her sister) to ferret out new tunes and artists.
"She always has a stack of things she wants me to hear," Priddy said. "If new music finds me, that's cool."
Although survey participants were more likely to use the Internet to search for music than cell phones, online information had a bigger impact on cell phone users.
"If you spend $15 or $18 on a CD or a few songs, if they're lemons, you're not going to be in that much trouble," Horrigan said. With cell phones, "People were comparing features online and sort of drilling down into various dimensions of cell phone use."
Three-quarters of music buyers said their last purchase was in a store, while more than 80 percent said all or most of their music purchases were CDs, not downloads. A similar phenomenon holds true for cell phones. The survey shows that 78 percent of purchases took place in person.
"The large majority of people are executing their transactions at stores, not online, even for music, a purely digital good," Horrigan said.
Even so, more than two-fifths of cell phone and music buyers and nearly a third of homebuyers said they saved money as a result of online research.
In housing, the results were mixed. About half the survey participants who had moved within the past year reported that they had turned to the Internet.
"For home buying, there was a heavy reliance on the Internet" to narrow down neighborhoods or eliminate options that are too expensive, Horrigan said. "Still, people were using the same old techniques of using a real estate agent."
Not surprisingly, house or apartment hunters were more likely to turn to the Internet if they were moving to a new city. About 60 percent of those changing municipalities looked to the Web. About 55 percent of those worked with a real estate agent.
Priddy, who moved to Baltimore from Oakland, Calif., last May, started looking for roommates and apartments online through craigslist.com - a free classified advertising site. Initially, she had no luck.
"I didn't even get a single call back, because people want to meet the people they're renting to and I had no ability to meet them," she said. Priddy returned to the Web, this time in order to find the Johns Hopkins shuttle route and look for apartments within walking distance.
