Online Music Fans Start to Pay the Piper
from the slowly-but-surely dept
The NY Times has an article saying that even among the old Napster loyalists who always swore they would never pay for music, a few have come around and signed up for music subscription services. The two that are most talked about are eMusic, which lets people freely download MP3s and Listen.com's Rhapsody, which lets users stream music. Personally, I still don't think these are replacements for Napster or any of the other P2P sharing networks. The nice thing about those systems were the fact that it was all about the sharing - and you could find others who liked similar music and they could recommend and share specific bands and songs with you. The subscription services are (not surprisingly) the top down model and not the bottom up model where the users themselves make the service worthwhile.
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P2P Networks
You always just seem to disagree with anythign that has anythign to do with efforts in a business model for distrubuting music. Would you actually pay for a P2P service like what Napster used to be? I could be wrong, but it seems I get the feeling you want your music, liek how P2P's distribute it, how you discover new music, but I have not seen any inclanation that you would pay for such a service. Would you?
I hate the RIAA just as much or more than the next person, but I do agree that the artist should get some benefit from their music. I also do not buy into any RIAA propoganda, CD sales have been dropping for awhile, before p2p networks, not because of p2p networks, but because of prices, the economy is in the crapper yet cd prices are on the rise, or have risen during this time.
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Re: P2P Networks
You're changing the debate however. My argument, throughout all of this is that the musicians and the labels are making a HUGE mistake in trying to charge for this stuff. They absolutely SHOULD be offering it for free. It's the greatest, cheapest, simplest distribution and promotion mechanism ever invented. The problem is that the music industry doesn't understand that content can be used for promotion. They think that every bit of content must be paid for. That's wrong, and it's dangerous - because it's going to kill them off.
Their job, then, is to figure out a reasonable business model based on the idea that there is freely distributed music acting as promotion for... something. And, that something is what they should be working on.
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