From the music industry point of view, it's not about serving the customer, it's about extracting as much revenue as possible before the recorded music market collapses.
I used a quote from this article during our Demo Day pitch. The problem I have with these particular demands is, what if one of the companies the industry cripples and destroys was actually on track to breathe a little life back into the recording industry? I haven't bought this much new music in a long time and it feels awesome. What if they prohibit features that would cause a 10% increase in purchases because Amazon refuses to be strong armed into paying $30M to overcome legal technicalities? Amazon doesn't make nearly what the labels do off of the music, so $30M might be enough to stop them from doing something that drives $1B in growth for the labels. And all of this to stop people from stealing who are not buying anything no matter what you do. It's just bad business.
Not to be too meta, but I think you also have to look at how they are choosing which strategies to implement. I remember hearing in a Clay Shirkey talk, that when an institution is threatened all nominal goals of the institution get pushed back, and survival becomes the main goal.
I look at the behavior of the music industry, and all of the seemingly short-sighted moves they make, and I can't help but think they are all operating or beginning to shift into survival mode, trying simple not to die.
I don't think it's that they want digital goods to die out, or are threatened by them, since iTunes, with foresight and good design, was able to turn digital sales into a success, I think it's more that they are experiencing the institutional equivalent of tunnel vision and depth-first thinking. They aren't implementing these solutions because they are too focused on the short term problem of their survival.
The problem is that there are $9B in recorded music sales. A small percentage of people actually steal music (I believe it's like 9%). You have a bunch of people who probably don't buy much music because it's inconvenient. Then you have other people who would buy more music if it was more convenient. The % of people who steal isn't likely to go up just because storing files online through Amazon's PAID service (keep in mind these people are stealing because they don't like paying for things) makes it easier to access your music. But the potential for the $9B worth of customers you have increasing their purchases is completely mitigated by this nonsense. If I am not an example of a fairly typical consumer in this area, I don't know who is.
You don't need to convince me; you need to convince the music industry - and to be honest I don't think your arguments are strong enough.
A small percentage of people actually steal music (I believe it's like 9%)
Where did you get that number? Most studies I've seen estimate between 25 and 50% of music consumer pirate at least some. Here's a random article:
Recently Entertainment Media Research conducted a survey with 1,500 UK residents and discovered that the number of music fans downloading music illegally actually dropped to 39 percent, a whopping 4 percent difference from last year’s statistics.
(Yes, it's the RIAA... but that's the music industry.. the people you need to convince)
The % of people who steal isn't likely to go up just because storing files online through Amazon's PAID service (keep in mind these people are stealing because they don't like paying for things) makes it easier to access your music.
That's where you and the music industry disagree very strongly - and in their defense I think they have a case. They look at the precedent of people paying for blank CDs to copy their friends CDs to, and say "well, why won't one person just go to their friends place and let them download their entire collection from Amazon".
The point is, these people are stealing already, and the difference in the ease of stealing using what's already available and the ease of using Amazon is not that big of a difference, and the current stealing techniques don't cost a monthly fee. I don't see people switching to Amazon for all of their theft. As someone pointed out, Amazon could easily monitor this behavior and turn these people in. At least with the current theft you aren't being watched by a big company with a vested interest in you paying for your music.
>1) The increased availability of digital music will lead to an increase in piracy
(not a criticism, I agree it's arguable)
I would suggest that the availability of pirated music is approaching a fairly good level of saturation. It also keeps pace with new releases and in most cases offers a much greater variety of older/niche music.
I always try to buy what I can, but sometime it's not an option.
Why would they seek such large damages? According to your source, they believe on some level that these lawsuits won't deter piracy, and I find it difficult to believe that she will be capable of paying the damages in full, or that the win will offset the legal costs of Capitol records.
In fact, fast forward to the present, and we see that this has gone through several retrials (meaning she probably hasn't payed a cent to capitol records), and the damages have been upped to $1.5million.
So, what are the short term gains from these sorts of lawsuits, are the precedents they set enough to get damages from other suits?
I can't help but draw a parallel to computer games. I find myself buying computer games less and less for this exact reason. If I get the game off a torrent, I will have a better experience. Every time I sit down to play a game I actually purchased, I feel cheated: "insert the disk, connect to the internet, and jump through this hoop please." How about the $60 I just payed? Not proof enough? Piracy is the publishers problem; they insist on making it mine.
In fact, I buy more and more Indie games for this reason, even though I don't play them that much. I just like the fact that some still have the balls to offer their work DRM free to ensure a good experience for the paying customer.
This is true when you buy retail, but I find it hard to begrudge Steam. I can buy a game and have it ready to play within the hour. And when I go to the parents' house, I can install the games I bought onto their computer.
It's not without its issues, but at least Steam offers added value with its DRM; more than you can say for EA or Ubisoft.
I still play games I bought ten years ago. Can you definitively say that the same will be true for content you purchase using Steam? What about 20 years from now? The value of your purchase is now directly tied to the success of the company. In other words, their choice of using DRM is taking actual value away from you. Arguably, a pirate wont have these issues.
That will be 10 or 20 years from now, Steam's convenience is today. If it really becomes an issue, some form of piracy will always be available to recover those games.
20 years ago games came on floppies and ran on DOS. If I want to play one today, the legality of my copy is really the least of the hurdles.
Not really. I still play Master of Orion on a regular basis, and it came out in 1991. Same with the original Civilization from 1990.
The reason I can still play these games is because I have a copy of them. That's the point in question here. Do I really have a copy of Portal 2? It's on my computer now, sure. But will I be able to fire it up and reminisce in 2031?
That was true for games that came out prior to mass dialup and then mass broadband. Since then I have an ever increasing stack of games (and other software) that are unplayable as companies decided that keeping the auth servers up was too expensive (or the company folded, the IPs were sold off and the auth servers brought down). Either way, that disc is pretty much a meaningless waste of space now. BTW, anyone want this awesome System Shock 2 coaster?
The sheer mass of games that depend on steam and the number of companies involved do a lot to ensure that people will act to keep it up far more so than single-game servers.
I never liked this argument. If you weigh up the disadvantage of the possibility of Steam going under in the future and your games being rendered unplayable with the advantages of instant updating, single social interface and ease of delivery that Steam provides I like to think that it's a good example of the consumer winning.
To me it's a bit like suggesting that you should just photocopy a book rather than buying it because if you buy it the pages may wear out one day.
Half-Life was released in 1998. I can still play it--using the product key from my original retail purchase!--via Steam.
Can I definitively say that this will hold for all my current Steam purchases? No, of course not. I can, however, say that Valve has demonstrated the ability to keep giving me access to my games over a period of more than a decade.
In contrast, I have many games on CD that I can't play any more, because they don't work on modern operating systems. Some of these I've repurchased through gog.com, just to get working versions. Some I've repurchased even though they still work, just to get versions that don't require five CDs to install.
Buying a game from Steam is a calculated risk. It comes with advantages: No need to fiddle with discs, automatic patch updates, and access to all my games from any networked computer. It comes with one big disadvantage: The potential of losing access to my games at some unspecified point in the future.
That's a pretty good tradeoff for me. Maybe it isn't for you, and that's okay. When I consider Valve's established track record, however, I believe that the odds of Steam providing my games for long enough are very good--where "long enough" is "until the game ceases to work on newer operating systems and/or becomes available for repurchase for trivial amounts of money".
And if they fail me, there's always piracy. After all, I'm hardly going to feel guilty or morally culpable for resorting to piracy to reacquire access to something that I already own.
I bought Portal 2, I got bored of it after the few hours of gameplay it has, and I wanted to let my girlfriend play it (who has just finished Portal 1). Can't do that without giving her my login.
That alone means Steam games are worth perhaps only 30% of retail price to me; but they are not priced like that in the UK. They're usually 10-30% more expensive than e.g. Amazon.
These are the biggest kinds of problems I have with DRM, when it's not something like Securom complaining that I'm running Process Explorer.
You of course realize, not all contract terms are binding, yet when contract terms are implemented in software, they become much more binding than when they are interpreted by a court of law.
You also realize that not all license agreements are the same; and first sale doctrine normally gives right to resell copyrighted works. I would in effect be gifting the game to my girlfriend, rather than lending it, as I wouldn't be playing it again.
And thanks for accusing me of breaking the law. I appreciate it.
(The thing that tipped me into buying the game on Steam was that I'd also be supporting independent developers with the Potato Sack etc.)
First of all, please don't conflate license agreement and statute -- a statute is law, a license agreement is a private contract that may or may not be valid.
The US has until recently had strong case law support for lending and reselling goods. Look up the first sale doctrine, which states that copyright holders can only impose restrictions on the first sale of a copyrighted project, and thereafter the property can be used, sold, abused, denigrated, etc., as desired by the possessor. This is actually a really important part of copyright law, because without it a copyright holder could say "You can't give my CD to charity, I don't make money for poor people" (manifest practically as "you must not charge less than x price"), and otherwise impose ridiculous restrictions on private property, thereby diminishing the real property of the possessor in favor of the theorized intellectual property assigned to the copyright holder in order to promote useful progress in the arts. To the extent that copyright powers do not promote useful progress in the arts, they should be entirely demolished!!!
And what happens if the power is out in your apartment? Don't reply "my laptop has a battery", because you have to charge the battery when the power is online.
Seriously: what kind of uptime reliability do you demand from a game? The fact that it has an offline mode already puts it far ahead of most cloud-based services. If you don't like Steam for political reasons, that's fine, but this is a very weak line of argumentation.
I'll often head off to a remote 3rd world beach for months at a time. I bring a laptop along, and usually stock up on a few games to pass the odd rainy afternoon in the hammock.
For this use case, something like Steam is just crippling. Even if you remember to put your games into "offline" mode before leaving home, it still insists on connecting to the server every month or so just to be sure. I'm in a place with generator power a couple hours a day and no internet. That's an edge case they didn't plan for, and it only hurts people who paid for the game.
Power being out, luckily, is something that can be dealt with by the individual consumer (call power company, go to a neighbor's house, etc). The point here is that if Steam goes offline (through glitch or bankruptcy or whatever reason), there is nothing at all the paying consumer can do, outside of hacking/pirating the game. This is a massive loss of functionality from games past.
And yes, Steam does give new features in return (online backup of your games, unified chat, etc), but there is no technical reason to have to trade the old features for new.
This is a massive loss of functionality from games past.
Really? Maybe it's my age showing, but most of my "games past" are on 5-14" floppies for DOS, or cassette tapes aimed at the Commodore 6502 architecture.
Portability over time has thus far proven to be largely a myth. If you think that the CD/DVDs you've purchased so far are "buy once, play forever", just you wait...
But in that case, again, it's entirely up to the paying customer. You could have kept your Commodore 6502 to play those games (just like I still have my NES and Sega Genesis) - it's up to you. The actions of the company (and the existence of the company) have nothing to do with whether you can play those games in 2011.
Is that actually true? I can quit and start Steam as often as I want while being offline. The firewall in my dorm is configured in such a way that I don't have access to Steam but I had never a problem starting Steam up in offline mode, even after restarts of my computer.
I think that I can't install new games but I certainly can play the ones I already have.
My internet connection is a little bit sketchy so I have had the problem of steam thinking it is connected to the internet but not connecting to my account. Then it asks for my password again and will not let me log in until I have internet access. But on the whole I don't have a major problem with steam's drm.
Between Steam and iTunes (and equiv for Android) there's not much disk inserting and stuff to be done anymore.
I will say some games are utter shite though with requiring internet - like C&C4 where the game is deliberately married to it and doesn't run without it.
Yeah, I'm not a big gamer but it seems very similar. The simple fact is, a percentage of people will break the law and steal these things, and many of those people take pride in doing it when it's more difficult to accomplish. Meanwhile, the honest people just want to buy the product and enjoy it, and we're constantly penalized, even though the efforts of these initiatives rarely make a big impact on theft.
I think taking Mr. Robertson at face value about the industry demands and the purposes behind them is a mistake. We already have an Amazon service with no current legal action, and we'll soon have similar services from Apple and Google.
The music industry is excellent at providing 100 objections or hoops to jump through for licensing while they're really just delaying your offering until a favored son's (AAPL) service launches. Many of the rest of the objections will come down to dollar figures. Oh, yeah, we can forget about that concern as long as you lose a little on the back end.
Let's not forget that Michael has historically been no real friend of the industry, and entertainment lawyers don't quickly forget things like that. Ten+ years ago the the two industries were more or less at war, and music was loosing. Around the time that napster got huge and got sued like crazy, and industry players like AOL music had staff dropping decentralized p2p code written on company time, my.mp3.com was born. It let anyone that stuck the physical cd into their computer claim ownership of it and have access to it in the cloud, or whatever nonsense we were calling it then. The very easy to read nod and a wink involved there was that you could borrow your friends cd's at work, wherever and in just a few minutes "rip" them all and have access without all the muss of actually ripping and copying them.
The labels shut it down then, and they're unlikely to have forgotten who he is.
The ways he's thumbed his nose at the industry go well beyond my.mp3.com. I was employee #5 or 6 at MP3tunes (don't remember exactly), and saw it from the inception as an indie music store to an advanced locker service. One of the main things that led to me leaving the company was the AnywhereCD service, which -- while being a separate company in theory -- was built in early 2007. The concept was great: you buy a CD, and you immediately get the songs in your MP3tunes locker, along with the physical CD mailed to you. Everything was on track to be awesome; we signed Warner Music on for the initial launch, and all the tech worked brilliantly.
Why did it fail? MR made the decision to allow people to ship the CDs to nowhere. You owned the CD, but it was (in essence) thrown away. Warner explicitly did not want digital-only sales, and that was the only reason they signed on in the first place. He could've launched a service that made everyone happy, but instead he launched with that option, and Warner shut the service down on day one.
> My iPod only holds 30GB of music, and I already have that much on there. So, every time I want to add a new album, I have to get rid of something else. I already chopped my music collection down to the 30GB limit in the first place. At this point, any new album I buy actually displaces an album I already know I love! That puts the price of discovery pretty high.
While I generally agree with the sentiment of the article, he really has trouble picking which of the 16 days of music to take off? My iTunes is set up to automatically load the most played couple thousand songs (4-5 days of music or so), the most recently added songs, the most recently played couple hundred songs, and then more or less randomly pick from the rest. There are songs I haven't listened to in literally years, and I find it hard to imagine that I will, while driving or elsewhere away from my computer, suddenly want to start listening to them right this instant. Talk about first-world problems...
I hate the term "first-world problems". It seems like every time it's used, it's in the manner of "I don't think this is an issue so I'll dismiss it by comparing it to starving children in Ethiopia".
Corporations snooping on all your internet traffic? Talk about a first world problem. Internet passwords being stolen? That's a first-world problem if I every heard of one. Health insurance backrupting you if you actually need to use it? Puh-lease, just having health insurance means you've got it better than most other people in the world!
Dismissing something as a "first-world problem" to imply that it shouldn't be worried about is intellectually dishonest.
Agree. In my circles, it's never dismissive but always a brief "If that's a significant problem for you, you have it pretty good" distraction that the group laughs about before returning to the discussion.
Agreed. I've usually heard it used by someone to deprecate their own problems, when they know they're whining about something that isn't really a big deal. https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23firstworldproblem
Here we've got someone who has a magical device not much bigger than a wristwatch that holds 16 days worth of music, and he's complaining that it's not enough. For comparison, I was in college when Sony released the first Walkman, and we thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread-- a device the size of a paperback book that allowed you to listen to 90 minutes worth of music while walking around.
So, yeah: 30GB capacity on an iPod is a first-world problem, in my book.
This still doesn't change the fact that I have to plug my iPod in to get this setup (my iPod currently never leaves my car) and it still means some of my music is always inaccessible. Both of those things discourage me from buying new music.
i like my months of music. i never know when ill come across some new song ive never heard, but have, and now love. and just because i havent listented to a song in years, doesnt mean i never want to hear it again. maybe i forgot about it. maybe once in a blue moon that old Blind Melon song comes on, and it just takes you BACK! Know what I mean?
The recording industry's bigger problem has been that for the past twenty years or more, it seems to have gotten the idea that its consumer base consists almost entirely of twelve year old girls, and at the same time the bigger companies have been absorbing or destroying all the smaller labels that actually produce the innovative music that people want to hear and would willingly pay for. You know there's a problem when kids are saying that all the new music is garbage and listen to music that was made before their parents were born. That's not to say good music is not out there, it's just really hard to find sometimes.
I have heard a few owners of small labels say that they actually welcome the emerging distribution models, and if some of the music is downloaded or whatever (within reason) then that's cool too. That means that they are reaching an audience that is increasingly hard to reach, and so have the potential to find revenue by less traditional means. So while the days of super-bands are probably over, small labels and bands can actually make a decent living now doing what they love to do - producing good music that people like.
Consider this: most bands make their money through live performances and licensing. When you look at the total record sale for a band like the Rolling Stones versus their overall net worth, it becomes pretty apparent that, considering their percentage of the sales, they could not have made all their money by moving boxes full of vinyl, CDs or whatever. The same is true for just about every artist you've ever heard of.
To the irritation of the big labels, though, these new models are quickly cutting out the guys in the middle who don't really care about the quality of the music. They don't seem to get the idea that if they made an effort to produce a product that people want, then (surprise) people will but it. Instead of putting a pile of money into five "artists" that suck, spread it out to smaller projects that collectively do well - like the small labels do it.
I actually heard one of these boring suits discussing the downloading problem on a business program, and he said that if illegal downloading continued on its present course then they would no longer be able to finance all the mega-expensive music videos. All I can say to that is that we should all fire up BitTorrent and make it happen.
Everybody knows the record companies will fade away. It's not because of piracy though. Two reasons that come to mind are that there are no more physical "records" needed, and, that the quality of the produced music went down the hill since the seventies. There are very few exceptions.
What's played on radio and music-tv stations nowadays is just bad and bad music is pushed by the music execs to them.
Lady Gaga, Kesha, all the hip hop bullshit, all the alternative crap, most rap, the black eyes peas (!!!) do I need to say more? That's not music, it's a show to make money, and nothing more. No way I, or anyone else interested in music would buy that.
I am a musician, I even studied music, and I cannot find a radio station with proper music, I find some streams, the same way I cannot find a record label to produce my music, they say it would be "too unpopular", I find some live concerts though, which keeps me alive.
There is no room for just good songs anymore, so there is no room for the record industry, who caused that.
I think there is actually MORE good music now than there was in the past precisely because there is more music. For every Lady Gaga there is a Radiohead, for every Kesha there is a TV on the Radio, for every Black Eyed Pea(s) there is The Bad Plus. In the 70s, radio stations played Captain & Teneille. The mass market drivel has always been there, you just can't look to the radio for your musical discovery.
See this 2009 article for their thinking: http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/big-music-will-surrender-bu...