- elmicker
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Posted by: Economics
Why pay a dollar a song, which he might have willingly paid, when you can steal it with no penalty?Isn't the free market wonderful?
Though you're being disingenuous here. I don't even have to steal it. As has been pointed out numerous times, sites like spotify, grooveshark, last.fm and youtube provide almost exactly the same free service, but perfectly legally.
We aren't just talking about purchase vs piracy here, we're talking about purchase vs music as a service vs piracy. Labels are holding back music as a service, and it is seriously to the detriment of their industry; just look how much Spotify had to gut their business model to get clearance to operate in the US.
Same thing happened with Viacom and Youtube. Viacom abused youtube as a marketing tool, uploaded their content en masse, but still sued youtube for an extortionate amount of money, attempting to wrangle every user's personal data and youtube's entire source code in the process.
It was only by ignoring copyright law entirely and staying under the radar until they were too big to be brought down that YouTube got where it is today; a key source of revenues for all the players that would have happily killed it in its infancy.
Copyright law is not only archaic, it's routinely abused. It needs reforming in the direction of open communication, not a locked down, corporate-only internet.
And that is the problem.It's only a problem if you think the label deserves the money. Most people don't, so most people don't care. They don't see it as a problem, they see it as an evolution of the market.
We're no longer reliant on physically moving lumps of paper, plastic or aluminium around to communicate, we have an entirely new medium, with nearly zero costs. That has resulted in a significant change to the supply side of the model; a shift right on a simple s/d diagram for the market. It doesn't matter whether you think this should be the case, it is the case, and using government intervention to drag the market back to the mid 80s is luddism of the worst kind.
A record company cannot expect to continue on with its same old business model of 100% ownership of track and artist and charging every one every time they play it, regardless of how much value they've actually brought to the equation.
Take the games industry, for example. First and foremost, games shifted focus from PCs to consoles; less susceptible to piracy and with a stronger lock in. Secondly, all major publishers now rely on digital distribution and drm of some form, either for everything on the PC, or just DLC on the consoles. We're provided subscription-basis statistics services, hosting and networking. Things we never got before.
Even the film industry has attempted to advance itself by pushing 3D and imax.
But what has the music industry done? Nothing. The sooner the labels die, the better. They own everything about music except the bit that has actual value: live performances. Unless they start innovating to keep up with the rest of society, to add some actual value to their products, to develop quality artists rather than mass-produce factory crap and then protecting them with archaic copyright laws, they'll die soon.
[Edited on 01.14.2012 2:29 PM PST]