Buyers Would Pay More To Copy Digital Music
from the music-industry-will-misunderstand... dept
The latest out of Jupiter Research is that consumers want ownership of the music they get. They want to be able to copy any music they buy, so that they can listen to it in multiple places. In fact, the research suggests they're willing to pay a premium for music that has no restrictions. There's also the flip side of this, which is that they're not very interested in any music with copy protection schemes. Since the entire music industry seems to be focused on how to add in copy protection, this just shows how backwards the music industry is right now. They're actively working on building a system that makes their product less valuable to their customers. It's anti-marketing - providing your customers with exactly what they don't want.
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calling Mr Obvious......
Would they raise the currently high price to allow us to do what we are already entitled by law to do ?
I guess this will continue until something else comes along that makes better headlines ...
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Copy Protection and Fair Use
1) All the hyper-mega-corporations get together and create a central database where a consumer would register their devices to “enable” them to play music that they have purchased. Of course you would have to limit the number of devices that a consumer could have "active" at any time to limit misuse of the system. Oh, and every device is going to have to connect to this database somehow, which would be too expensive to implement. Odds of this happening are about zero.
2) Create a "universal" storage medium that files can be copied onto but not from. Well, since there are now seemingly about a 1000 different digital storage mediums (e.g., compact flash, hard drives, secure digital, mini secure digital.. you get the idea), you just aren't going to have a "universal" format like CDs in the future. Not going to happen.
3) Beats me???
Ok, so what do you do? Well if you are a hyper-mega corporation, you just throw out fair use and keep working on copy protection. A good example of this is AOL's recent announcement of their TIVO-like service. That is, a service which does far less than TIVO currently does, just to retain complete control over the content. Consumers aren't going to buy it.
What the hyper-mega corporations should do is to forget about copy protection and get on with innovation and a fair business model for everyone. I'd pay for a service where I can download any type of music I want, use it on any device I want and feel good about it because I am directly supporting the artist's whose music I've downloaded (not just Michael Jackson and Madonna as is the current case). Of course, such a service would be disruptive to the current music-distribution oligopoly, so odds of this happening are about zero too.
However, just think about how cool a digital music service could really be... part Amazon user recommendations, part Kazaa P2P, part all-you-can-eat buffet, part CreativeCommons.org... ok, I’m dreaming now.
-dan
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