"All right action flows from the breath"
- Hajakujo

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Tuesday, October 14, 2008

They told me to do it...

4 comments:

Chris said...

Ha! I feel this dilemma quite acutely. I don't want to support the waste of resources that is the packaged goods approach to buying music, but I have no option to buy digital files that don't come with DRM restrictions I will not agree to.

So I end up sometimes buying albums and ripping them, and sometimes just downloading albums and feeling bad about the implied 'theft'.

I've said it before, but I would gladly pay a subscription for a decent media download service. But I'm not willing to accede to renting my music, which is what all DRM solutions amount to in the long term (only the implied terms vary).

And at the same time, I think that if most artists make their money from touring and licensing their music to advertisers, from whom am I really stealing? The media corporations unwilling to compete in the new market place?

At this point, my sympathy falls into a black hole, never to return.

Best wishes!

Unknown said...

Pay what you want schemes seem to me to be a perfectly sustainable workaround. If unscrupulous people can get your music for free through piracy, then you can't force them to pay by having a minimum market price. If they are scrupulous, then you should rely on that more than on the dodgy guarantee of protection offered by DRM. People say pay-what-you-want can only work for big bands, their argument is based on the idea that revenue guarantees exposure and thus demand. Piracy has really made this point moot - exposure will have to be paid for through other revenue streams, like touring.

Which brings me on to the other failure of imagination of the music industry bigwigs.
I've said it before - digital recordings of gigs, straight from the sound engineers desk, should be a cinch to do and would sell big, distributed on the night to people's wired mobile devices. Pay in advance as an add-on to the ticket price.

Good ideas are rife, good actions aren't...

Chris said...

Ha, I came to comment here only to find I had already said everything I wanted to say! :)

It occurred to me the other week that I pay £50 a month for my media, paid to the service provided which delivers TV and internet. The problem (from a particular perspective) is not that I'm not paying for all my media (although I am not), it's that my service provider isn't passing on revenue to all of the content providers...

Unknown said...

Yes, the poor pirate/consumer wants the ISP to be their online media accountant, and the 'rights holders' want the ISPs to be their police state. The ISP just wants to keep raking in cash, while offering services that most people don't even realise are manipulated to boost revenue while lowering QoS...
And we thought the wild west was dead!