Do they charge you for the first hit of dope?\u00c2\u00a0 Do they make you buy a car without a test drive?\u00c2\u00a0 Then what makes the rights holders believe that Rdio or MOG or Rhapsody will be successful?<\/p>\n
Don’t point to iTunes.\u00c2\u00a0 The iTunes Store is a failure.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 How is the music industry going to stop the flow of free music?<\/p>\n
By authorizing free music.\u00c2\u00a0 And upselling from there.<\/p>\n
First and foremost, you have to disincentivize people from stealing.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
It’s a pain in the ass to steal.\u00c2\u00a0 You have to find the track\/album and wait for it to download.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s the opposite of normal twenty first century experience, where everything is instant.\u00c2\u00a0 Imagine if you had to wait ten minutes for your e-mail. Would you tolerate that?\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what stealing music is like.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is why YouTube is so successful.\u00c2\u00a0 Not for videos, but for listening to music.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s the go-to platform.\u00c2\u00a0 Ever notice that YouTube is free?<\/p>\n
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.\u00c2\u00a0 If you want to hear a track you might start off at a band’s website.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Why shouldn’t rights holders get paid for these listens?<\/p>\n
I know, I know, it’s tough for rights holders to wrap their heads around this one.\u00c2\u00a0 Just like it was hard to wrap their heads around the original Napster.\u00c2\u00a0 Albums must be sold as ten tracks for twenty dollars on a piece of plastic.\u00c2\u00a0 Who’d want anything else?\u00c2\u00a0 Boatloads of people.\u00c2\u00a0 And they all tried Napster because it was free.<\/p>\n
The next revolution in music distribution will start off free.\u00c2\u00a0 Because, right now, music is free.\u00c2\u00a0 Via P2P, hard drive swap, IM swap and YouTube.\u00c2\u00a0 Why on earth should anybody pay for it?<\/p>\n
But if Spotify were launched in America, it would eliminate most theft.\u00c2\u00a0 It just doesn’t pay to steal if you’ve got Spotify.<\/p>\n
But the labels don’t want to give that much power to one entity.\u00c2\u00a0 They don’t want to get the public hooked on free, even though music’s already free, quite a conundrum.\u00c2\u00a0 What do the labels want other than a return to yesteryear and a pile of money?<\/p>\n
Tell me one online success that started off as a pay service.\u00c2\u00a0 Yahoo was and still is free.\u00c2\u00a0 Google is free.\u00c2\u00a0 Facebook is free.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 But I ask you, are they replicating cars and furniture online?\u00c2\u00a0 Of course not.\u00c2\u00a0 So can we stop that debate?<\/p>\n
You didn’t get Napster until you used it.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Don’t you see?\u00c2\u00a0 People are going to have to try the new service first for free!\u00c2\u00a0 And you’re gonna have to entice them to pay thereafter, just like you pay for bottled water.\u00c2\u00a0 Ironically, by offering non-musical elements.\u00c2\u00a0 Portability on mobile handsets.\u00c2\u00a0 Ability to listen to friends’ music.\u00c2\u00a0 Higher quality rips.<\/p>\n
Spotify’s got it right.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
YouTube’s a lousy interface for listening to music.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 P2P is tiresome and you don’t have all the music at your fingertips.\u00c2\u00a0 Rhapsody is stuck at under a million subscribers and the even cheaper Best Buy Napster has got no traction.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Spotify is so good, it closes you instantly.\u00c2\u00a0 But the rights holders refuse to offer this dope.\u00c2\u00a0 Under the guise of maintaining the value of music, of not making music free, but don’t you get it?\u00c2\u00a0 MUSIC IS ALREADY FREE!<\/p>\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Do they charge you for the first hit of dope?\u00c2\u00a0 Do they make you buy a car without a test drive?\u00c2\u00a0 Then what makes the rights holders believe that Rdio or MOG or Rhapsody will be successful? Don’t point to iTunes.\u00c2\u00a0 The iTunes Store is a failure.\u00c2\u00a0 The music industry needs a cap on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s96vPs-free","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}