How not to sell music

Once again, the music industry demonstrates that it has no clue what to do when it comes to handling digital music. They are now selling music on USB sticks instead of as CDs, hoping to replace the ailing single format. To do this, they are replacing a £2.99 format with a £4.99 format. If this would work, it would mean that customer would be swimming in USB-sticks with no apparent use, since the music would be transfered to a storage disk for easy access as soon as you bring it home, just like a CD gets ripped once and then archived in the basement.

Not only is it idiotic from an environment to make customers buy electronics they don't need more than once, it is also idiotic from the music industry's survival perspectice to try to replace a dying format with another one that is more expensive.

A digital music track costs next to nothing to store since they are only bits on a disk. Customers expect the price for digital music to be significantly lower than the old formats where records had to be pressed, covers printed, albums distributed, store inventory kept, and so on. Today, the only thing that is needed to market music is a web site where you can buy mp3s online, and the costs for "producing" an mp3 like this are of course infinitesimal compared to old-style records. The natural thing would be for prices to reflect this. If they don't, customers will move over to getting their music via illegal downloads which are already easily available and cheap. It's as simple as that. The music industry has to add value to an existing service that is free. The only way I can see that happening is for them to drop prices to about $1/album or $.1/track and providing fast, rock-solid downloads with no customer-unfriendly DRM.

Andra bloggar om: music, marketing, piracy, drm, mp3
Technorati tags: music, marketing, piracy, drm, mp3

Music downloading is here to stay

According to a new survey, pirating is up in Sweden. 43% now claim to have downloaded music illegally, up from 36% last year. One of the most common reasons given for people downloading music illegally instead of buying it online is said to be DRM.

Meanwhile, Karl Sigfrid (a member of parliament for right-wing party Moderaterna) has asked prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt (also from Moderaterna) why the party is not adhering to its election-time promise of not hounding down an entire generation for copying. Neither the prime minister nor the minister of justice has deigned to comment.

The background to all this a proposed law that would require ISPs to give out personal data about downloaders. Sigfrid claims that Reinfeldt can't support this, since that would contradict his statements before the election. The EU's general lawyer has stated that ISPs don't need to give out this information unless local law requires them to, so there is nothing in the EU body of law that requires this change.

Sigfrid compares the police bust of The Pirate Bay with the copying of cassette tapes that was widespread 20 years ago, when double tape recorders were common. At that time, no one tried to make the police stop Sony from making double tape recorders. Today, only a few people are protesting when the police do exactly that; stop The Pirate Bay from providing tools for copying music. In both cases, music copying is wide-spread. The difference is in the reactions from the music industry and how the government has reacted to music industry lobbying.

Of course, there is no way back once the genie is out of the bottle. There is already a generation out there that are used to being able to download music from the net. They won't accept having that possibility taken away. They may accept having to pay for the service, as long as the service is better that copying, but downloading of music is here to stay. Music publishers will have to learn to live with that and make sure that their customers can buy their music in a simple, efficient, and DRM-free way. The alternative is illegal downloading, and that's free.

Andra bloggar om: music, musik, downloading, copying, piracy, copyright, nedladdning, fildelning, the pirate bay, eu, moderaterna, karl sigfrid, fredrik reinfeld, politics, drm
Technorati tags: music, musik, downloading, copying, piracy, copyright, nedladdning, fildelning, the pirate bay, eu, moderaterna, karl sigfrid, fredrik reinfeld, politics, drm