University Wire
10-18-2005
(The Battalion) (U-WIRE) COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- In the past few years, the music and movie industries have made fighting piracy one of their top concerns. One of their favorite methods, it seems, is suing individual people who share copyrighted materials on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Apparently they think that suing people is a good way to convince them to buy their products. This may be an effective deterrent, but I doubt that it will have any significant effect on sales.
The real problem is that the movie and music industries just don't get it. They are not giving their customers what they want. The Internet has opened the door to a completely different method of distribution, one that is cheap and easy and doesn't even require leaving your room. People like this. They want to get music online. Only recently has the recording industry begun to figure this out, and the movie industry has a long way to go.
With the rise of popular pay sites such as Apple's iTunes Music Store, it is obvious that people are willing to pay for online music. "Browsing in a store is horrible because you need to know what to look for," says graduate computer science student James Esslinger. "On the Web you can find exactly what type of music you like, then go purchase it from iTunes."
At the same time, it is clear that online customers still have certain demands that the recording industry does not understand. The industry wants to use Digital Rights Management technology to limit what users can do with the music they purchase online. For instance, iTunes limits the number of times that a purchased song can be burned to a CD. It also does not allow purchased music to be transferred to other computers without first burning it to a CD and then ripping it back from the CD.
Online pricing is also an issue. So far, people seem happy with the standard iTunes price of 99 cents per track and $9.99 per album, but some record labels are pressuring Apple to raise those prices and even threatening to pull their songs if Apple does not cooperate. They also want the option to make popular songs more expensive.
The music industry wants to blame piracy on falling sales, when they should be blaming themselves. While demand for CDs has fallen in the last decade, the price has steadily increased. Did anyone in this industry ever take an economics course? Raising prices causes demand to go down.
Another good economics lesson for the industry to learn is that giving consumers what they want leads to profit. Consumers want to purchase individual songs online, not pay up to $20 for an album with one good song on it.
The industry needs to wake up, because their market is changing with or without them, and suing their customers can only take them so far.
<!-- Photos Begin -->
photo1:
photo1 credit:
photo1 desc:
photo2:
photo2 credit:
photo2 desc:
<!-- Photos End -->
(C) 2005 The Battalion via U-WIRE
No comments:
Post a Comment