The tide has turned

[andrewducker]

A fantastic quote from the head of Yahoo Music:

I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

From here.

Comments

[recycled-sales.livejournal.com]

Or to translate:

"Woah, nobody's paying attention to me. Quick, what're all the other CEOs talking about? DRM? What's that? Yeah ok we hate it"

[andrewducker]

Ahem.

Read the article.

He used to work for Nullsoft, he was saying exactly the same things when Gnutella was released, back in 1999...

[recycled-sales.livejournal.com]

Ah fair enough.

It does seem to be the statement de rigueur amongst the heads of business these days to bash DRM, feels like you can't read any kind of tech page without one of them sounding off about it.

[andrewducker]

Oh, absolutely. But then it's in the interests of the music websites to get rid of DRM - it's just the publiushing companies that are stuck in the dark ages.

I remember how audacious an idea MP3.com - and what a huge shame it was that it got sued into oblivion.

[recycled-sales.livejournal.com]

Whilst I won't pretend to be an angelic being on the net, it is true that illegal downloading is an issue. That said, the track record of companies when faced with any form of digital media piracy has been woeful. It's not even the music companies. Computer games with their layers of (often harmful) content protection, the pathetic attempts by the film studios (if I was Knock-off Nigel I'd twat them one with a pint glass) it's all a clear sign that they don't understand.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Someone put it very succinctly yesterday ... a business model that charges people more for a crippled product they can get "for free" elsewhere is going to fail 100% of the time.

What the record companies need to do is find out what people want, what they will pay for, and then sell them *that* rather than pushing people away.

Most UK tap water is excellent and effectively "free" and yet people will still pay for bottled water ... there's a clue in there somewhere!

[recycled-sales.livejournal.com]

That said, tap water isn't available when you're walking down the street.

Downloading has very little to do with DRM, hell I'd be surprised if most people knew what it was. People download music because it's easy, and that's always going to be the reason.

[andrewducker]

I download because of DRM.

And yes, it's easy - but not as easy as popping to Amazon.com and clicking on the tracks I want. I'm very happy to do that rather than searching for torrents of the albums I want.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Indeed. There's a castle in hay on wye that sells books by the pound (there are tens of thousands of books scattered around and you just fill up a bag and they weigh it and charge you based on the weight).

It's a terrible way of finding a particular book you want :-)

If I want the latest KT Tunstall, I'll probably buy it from play.com or hmv.com or one of the other mail order CD sales companies.

However if there's some band (say, Ozric Tentacles) that I don't know but I've heard one track or someone has said "you should listen to them" then I'll bittorrent for them and if I like the stuff, then I'll go buy the CD.

Once I have big enough, reliable enough storage connected to my PC, I may stop buying physical CDs, but until then it's easier to have the CD in a case for longer term archival and easy location. I've lost too many hard disks in the last five years to trust having anything only on my hard disk ... and backing up hundreds of Gb is just too hard at 4.7Gb per disk.

And buying a licence for music stored on a remote server is fine if you trust they will still be there in five/ten years, but I don't trust them to still be there and to still have music in an accessible format ... plus I want to be able to play my music while driving in the wilds of wiltshire where mobile phones have no signal ...

[recycled-sales.livejournal.com]

Ah but the majority of casual users will download for practicality's sake, and it's the casual downloaders that the industry wants to target. Everyone knows you'll never stop piracy, people like you and me will always find ways around any kind of DRM. But if Joe Bloggs and his thousand friends keep pirating, that's the real issue for the recording industry.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Heh, CocaCola tried selling filtered tap water in bottles in the UK and it failed totally ...

... but all restaurants are required to provide tap water for free on request in the UK (or so I believe) and you can fill up an empty bottle before travelling (I do, but I add orange concentrate as well) and before leaving the pub last Thursday (London SF meeting) I asked the woman behind the bar to top up my travel bottle with tap water which she did with a smile.

But you do follow my point, if tap water was available easily on the street (water fountains etc.) then most people would be happy with that, or would pay money for the "extras" in Coke/Iced Tea etc. from vending machines.

Downloading per se has little to do with DRM, but downloading is easy and many people now have MP3 players and their main music listening is while travelling or sat in front of a copmuter ... so for those people downloading is the important bit, DRM or not, but when it costs *more* to get a DRM version that may be locked to one player, or expires, or is in some other way crippled, then there are those that will pay for convenience (the iTunes model) or for honesty (the emusic model) and the rest will make their choice based on many factors (personally I trial listen a lot of stuff and then buy physical CDs of the stuff I like the most)

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

actually tap water IS easily available from fountains in buildings etc most places i've been in the US and they still buy bottled water.. they managed to make water a luxury good. Difficult to do that with bits. LOsing vinyl size cover art was a mistake :-)

[nuttyxander.livejournal.com]

Describing itunes as "a spreadsheet that plays music" tickled me deeply.

I'm presuming he's not counting emusic because they are predominantly indie labels and subscription model based. Otherwise, a good piece.