Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Sep. 11 2003, 13:17 |
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| Quote (GunHead @ Sep. 11 2003, 12:40) | | I don't know how they are going to cope with this in the future, but I for one wouldn't mind if they put my monthly internet fee up and just said you can download anything you want. And they would STILL make their precious boatload of money! |
Well, interesting you should say this.
Let's look for a minute at two of the largest companies involved in the record industry, AOL Time Warner and Sony.
Now, to take AOL Time Warner first, they're a company who, amongst their many interests, is the world's largest internet service provider. Even more than that, in promoting AOL Broadband services in some places they tell customers that one advantage is...that they can download music. Because really, AOL Time Warner want people to share music and other large files on the internet, because it means people make more use of their internet services and therefore more money finds its way into the company bank account.
I think that they could actually do quite well out of offering music for download at reasonable prices as part of their internet services...but that would mean them being competitive, so no charging £20 for an album. Funny that the CDs don't seem to cost them that much when they have AOL software on them...
Now, Sony. I saw an advertisement for a Sony laptop in the paper a few weeks ago. The selling point was that it would let you copy CDs. I don't really know what CDs they think people are going to copy with it - if it was an ad in a music recording magazine I might be able to accept that it's aimed at musicians who want to make copies of their own work, but this was a national newspaper, the readers of which are most likely to only have one type of CD to copy, and that's commercial music CDs.
They're trying to have it both ways. AOL Time Warner want you to use AOL broadband so you can download music, but they don't want you to download their music from the internet. Sony want you to buy their laptops so you can copy CDs, but don't want you to copy their CDs.
They really need to think it through more. How about software with a Sony computer that actually encourages people to download music and make compilation CDs, for a small fee? How about an AOL Broadband deal which offers the very latest music for download, in exchange for a monthly membership charge?
One company which seems to be trying to show the way is Apple, whose iTunes music store had 1,000,000 downloads in the first week of opening (that is, from a user base of 2,000,000 iTunes 4 users). I think this shows that people are willing to pay for legal, downloadable music, as long as the price is kept reasonable. Have the record companies not realised yet that maybe people want to have music on their computers, that they want to download it to their mp3 players, and so maybe it would be a good idea if they offered a product to fit what at the moment is a bit of a hole in the market. When audio cassettes came out, they could have tried to stop people copying LPs to them (in fact, I think they did try...), but they did far better in the long run by actually selling albums on tape, thereby removing one reason why someone would want to copy the album (it didn't stop people who were making copies because they didn't want to pay for the album, of course, but it did mean they at least made some money where they could have made none had they not offered a product to fit the niche).
'Copy protecting' albums in the way they're trying is completely the opposite of that kind of strategy - they're just trying to restrict the way people listen to music instead of looking for ways to profit from the new trends in music listening.
There are always going to be people who don't pay for music and always have been - sure, I know people who have fair collections of copied music on CDR, minidisc or as mp3s, but I also used to know people who had similar collections of copied music on cassette. What the record companies need to do is give people an incentive to obtain their music legally. They seem to be going the wrong way, though - instead of offering great products at competitive prices, they offer mediochre to bad products at inflated prices and just try and stamp out (or buy out) all the competition so there's no choice but to buy what they're offering.
There's only so much the public will put up with, though...
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