| Tuesday, February 12, 2002 |
00:11 - Dunno if Britney'll like that, though...
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/02/fog0000000315.shtml
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I seem to have oversimplified a bit in my blue-sky blatherings on software and music piracy-- specifically, in trying to lump music and software piracy into the same bucket. This really doesn't fly as much as I'd hoped it would, as USS Clueless points out in a direct response (wow, a first for this young blog!).
I find myself trying to apply the same kinds of standards to the question of pirating music and pirating software; it's not staying put in my brain. I can't keep the argument steady. Some days it seems that exactly the same rules apply to the two industries, and other days I find myself trying to write about them in the same paragraph and failing to complete sentences in the same hour that I begin them.
But as den Beste points out, the two industries are on very different footings already; the software industry is still new, and they've never sold anything that couldn't be copied by users and hence manufactured without raw materials. The music industry started out in a publishing metaphor, under the assumption that consumers wouldn't be able to make free copies-- and then had to adjust to such developments as they came along.
So, okay, the software industry gets to price products into the hundreds and thousands of dollars, primarily deriving those price points from the large-scale corporate installations that account for their actual, measurable market share, rather than from how much Joe Hotmail is willing to pay for a copy of Photoshop before he gives up and grabs a cracked copy. This has been pointed out to me by numerous people-- the software world takes piracy into account in their business models, and pretty much always has.
Whereas music keeps getting sold for $15 a CD, of which less than a dollar might end up going to the artist. I refer to the Courtney Love article at Salon for an entertaining first-hand view of the subject, biased though it might be.
Software engineers don't tend to need, want, or expect to be compensated in the same way as Courtney Love has been.
So, yeah, music might benefit from being sold as a "perishable" item, like a magazine-- after all, Newsweek doesn't care if you Xerox it, and they put all their content online anyway. It's all ad-driven revenue. That's what all solutions seem to come back to: ad revenue. But let's extend the metaphor (I'm not actually trying to make a point here, just exploring the thought): Music could be published in online "albums", without much regard for digital rights or anything in the music stream itself-- plain old MP3s (or a clearly superior successor) would do. But the online "album" would be a website-- full of information on the band, biographies, reviews of the music, artwork, lyrics, message boards... in other words, the evolution of what currently passes for album art.
Are there ways to encourage people to buy original albums instead of doing downloads? Sure. Ironically, one of the best was lost in the transition from LP to CD: album art. There still is album art, but it isn't possible to do it well in 25 square inches. The old 12" album, especially if it had foldouts or multiple pages, could carry a lot of excess material over and above the material on the record itself. Two examples from the golden age of album art: Thick as a Brick, and Yessongs. But there may be other ways, such as holograms on the CDs.
Hey, screw the physical media-- let the imagination run wild here. A definitive web album for the music-- run by the record companies and with content produced by the band, and containing ads for revenue and possibly "pro" features (cool interactive games or streaming movies, for instance) to collect more fees, the fees currently realized by magazines in the form of subscriptions-- which has the music itself in the definitive, downloadable form. Sure, you could download the songs and then P2P them to each other. But why bother, if it's freely available right from the source, with so much value-added digital material available right there? I think fans would flock to the sites if they were definitive. A bare MP3 without all the attendant features would feel like a 2nd-generation copy of a movie taped off TV with commercials versus a DVD.
Are record companies currently padding their prices on the assumption that some CDs are going to suck, or be 14 tracks of crap and one hit, so they can count on getting the full price even from someone who just wants the one hit? Are most artists afraid of their own filler material, as Courtney accuses? If so, then a model where music is available in unfettered digital format online where people can pick-n-choose what they want to hear might indeed encourage artists who rely on filler to sort of fade away. But then, is that a bad thing? Probably not, except the big question that remains is one of numbers. How much would the loss of all that filler hit the labels? How much advertising would be necessary in order to make up for lost CD sales? How much money could they save by not having to make and distribute so many CDs? Is there an equilibrium among these variables? I suspect there is, but it isn't going to be at a point where the current number of active artists or the current market caps of the record labels would be able to remain the same. Those figures would have to change. A lot.
But now, the more I think about it, the cooler this seems. People do want to have their materials from a "definitive" source. They like feeling like they're getting the real thing, not a copy of a copy of a copy (even in digital media, it's still an uphill battle finding an MP3 that's free of encoding glitches or an MPEG where the quality is tolerable and the little end-pieces and bugs that get tacked on by the people who do the encoding aren't too obnoxious). The world of P2P is hardly one where pristine media is ubiquitous. Far, far from it.
I do have a lot of MP3 files-- about 90% of them are ripped from CDs I own, and almost all the rest are from friends I already knew rather than faceless Gnutella sources. I'm not exactly a typical example, I realize. But the problem with audio piracy is founded in the whole "high-volume copying" thing; making one or two copies to share with friends is noise, but putting it online for a million people to download is a big statistic. So I guess the way the industry needs to change is by looking at what people find compelling about P2P sharing, improving on that experience, and providing the same service for free and with better value-adds. Advertising is a small price for the consumers to pay for online albums... and we'd still be able to fill our iPods to our heart's content.
Let's just hope those numbers work out, eh?
(Oh, and by the way-- the aspersions in my previous post on this topic that I cast upon people making up excuses and justifications for piracy-- I wasn't aiming those at den Beste, but at the general atmosphere and mentality that I'd been picking up and responding to in earlier messages. No commentary on the ethicality of what den Beste suggests was intended.)
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