Even Free Can't Compete With Music Piracy | Hacker News Reader

Even Free Can't Compete With Music Piracy

techcrunch.com

7 pointsbrett8 comments

This is a very interesting point. The music industry has now taken so long to come up with a new business model that piracy has become the most convenient way to get music. Their stupidity has generated a whole infrastructure for music distribution that they now have to compete with.

They're in even worse trouble than I realized. And the movie business is next.

Do you think more bands/artists adopting Radiohead's model or at least selling DRM free music at low prices (much lower than iTunes .99) will make a dent in the piracy distribution model?

I suppose they'd have to be in a centralized web location for convenience and variety.

Then again, if more and more artists move away from DRM/labels, maybe piracy statistics will lose their significance altogether.

Hard to say. The point is, way less of a dent now than if they'd started 5 years ago.

Well, I have to say I'm quite pleased with Amazon's new music store. It's easier to find and download things than any peer-to-peer service I've tried, especially when I want the entire album[1]. And unlike the iTunes store, I don't have to use iTunes to do my shopping. It's all just browser-based, and then I can play the music in Amarok, which has a better interface than iTunes does.

[1] I listen mostly to classical music, which makes this the case a lot more often than with modern works.

I think it's important to distinguish between the business model and the mechanism of distribution.

The In Rainbows site was very slow, so I downloaded it via bittorrent. Lots of my friends did too. Most have gone back through the check-out process to pay something -- or they downloaded via bittorrent and ALSO bought the box set.

So there is still a valid complaint that the music industry is behind -- but it is in both distribution mechanisms and business models.

Music should be pushed out the door freely, even through bittorrent, with easy mechanisms to give back to the artist. That is the only model that can compete with piracy because it is the only one that has all the convenience of piracy with the warm glow of giving back to your favorite artists.

But one mechanism that can help is new music recommendations. Piracy is very bad at that. A search for a genre rarely brings up quality.

Journalists too often declare trends based on isolated examples. Where's the context? How do peer-to-peer downloads compare to legal sales for traditionally marketed albums?

Also, a lot of the illegal downloaders may get their music that way simply because it's how they've become accustomed to doing it the past few years. Over time, high-quality legal options could sway many of them.

I think iTunes is your high quality, legal option. With the non-DRM stuff now 99 cents along with the DRMed versions, its becoming more of an ideal legal alternative for illegal downloaders.

I highly doubt the music industry can create something better, but I'll embrace it if they do.

The problem I believe is that people have become accustomed to downloading off their favorite P2P service. Even if the music becomes free or extremly cheap somewhere else it will take a while to break that habbit.

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