Do they charge you for the first hit of dope?  Do they make you buy a car without a test drive?  Then what makes the rights holders believe that Rdio or MOG or Rhapsody will be successful?

Don’t point to iTunes.  The iTunes Store is a failure.  The music industry needs a cap on the well of unauthorized trading, but like BP they didn’t expect a problem, don’t want to admit there’s a problem, grossly understate the problem, but the difference is, BP finally stanched the flow of wayward oil.  How is the music industry going to stop the flow of free music?

By authorizing free music.  And upselling from there.

First and foremost, you have to disincentivize people from stealing.  And the way you do this is not by wielding a big stick, but by offering a carrot, something that’s more enticing than what they’ve got now.

It’s a pain in the ass to steal.  You have to find the track/album and wait for it to download.  It’s the opposite of normal twenty first century experience, where everything is instant.  Imagine if you had to wait ten minutes for your e-mail. Would you tolerate that?  That’s what stealing music is like.  Which is why YouTube is so successful.  Not for videos, but for listening to music.  It’s the go-to platform.  Ever notice that YouTube is free?

I’m not talking about videos, I’m not talking about Vevo, I’m talking about garden variety music, the kind that goes in your ears, not your eyes.  If you want to hear a track you might start off at a band’s website.  Then you’re going directly to YouTube, bypassing the horrible interface and slow rendering of MySpace, certainly not going to iTunes… You want to hear the song enough times to know you want to buy it.  Why shouldn’t rights holders get paid for these listens?

I know, I know, it’s tough for rights holders to wrap their heads around this one.  Just like it was hard to wrap their heads around the original Napster.  Albums must be sold as ten tracks for twenty dollars on a piece of plastic.  Who’d want anything else?  Boatloads of people.  And they all tried Napster because it was free.

The next revolution in music distribution will start off free.  Because, right now, music is free.  Via P2P, hard drive swap, IM swap and YouTube.  Why on earth should anybody pay for it?

But if Spotify were launched in America, it would eliminate most theft.  It just doesn’t pay to steal if you’ve got Spotify.

But the labels don’t want to give that much power to one entity.  They don’t want to get the public hooked on free, even though music’s already free, quite a conundrum.  What do the labels want other than a return to yesteryear and a pile of money?

Tell me one online success that started off as a pay service.  Yahoo was and still is free.  Google is free.  Facebook is free.  But the music industry believes it is different, that people should pay first. They go on about stealing cars and furniture and how it’s just unfair.  But I ask you, are they replicating cars and furniture online?  Of course not.  So can we stop that debate?

You didn’t get Napster until you used it.  And that’s why the labels lost, they didn’t allow their people to use it. Because Napster was like heroin, you instantly got hooked, and the only withdrawal that occurred was when the site was shut down.

Don’t you see?  People are going to have to try the new service first for free!  And you’re gonna have to entice them to pay thereafter, just like you pay for bottled water.  Ironically, by offering non-musical elements.  Portability on mobile handsets.  Ability to listen to friends’ music.  Higher quality rips.

Spotify’s got it right.  A perfect interface with free streaming and a paid for mobile app that allows thousands of tracks to live on your handset as if you owned them.

YouTube’s a lousy interface for listening to music.   P2P is tiresome and you don’t have all the music at your fingertips.  Rhapsody is stuck at under a million subscribers and the even cheaper Best Buy Napster has got no traction.  If you think you’re gonna get people to pay for these streaming services in droves, you’ve lost your mind. First and foremost, they’ve got to be free.

Spotify is so good, it closes you instantly.  But the rights holders refuse to offer this dope.  Under the guise of maintaining the value of music, of not making music free, but don’t you get it?  MUSIC IS ALREADY FREE!