p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- 1972 – First removable media, the 8-inch floppy disk is developed by an IBM team led by David Noble. It it opens the way to hand-to-hand file transfer over a “sneakernet,” the first kind of Person-2-Person sharing.

Twenty years later, Don’t copy that floppy is the punch-line to a campaign launched by the Software Publisher Association, aimed at teens.

The two clips sited above are just a few from a long list of others on the Wikipedia’s fascinating Timeline of file sharing which serve to underscore three principal realities in 2008:

1. File sharing has been elevated by vested interests in the music, movie and software industries from an obscure way for people to share with each other, to a major crime of international proportions;
2. Taxpayer funded government and  police agencies around the world have becomed corporate proxies, sucking up valuable manpower and other scarce resources which would clearly be far better employed on more important matters than protecting, and enhancing, corporate bottom lines.
3. The corporations still don’t know which way is up.

When it comes to music, the major record labels, Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US), have in particular completely misread and mismanaged things, turning what should have been an exciting and innovative way to distribute ‘product’ and to interface directly with people who keep them in business, into a massive, world-wide conflict, alienating their customers on all sides and further tarnishing their already seriously tattered images.

And they still haven’t succeeded in ‘monetizing’ downloading.

Maybe they should re-read suggestions from p2pnet reader Julian Bond from four years back.”How much are you really prepared to pay for music?” – he asked, going on »»»

Here’s my answer.

The first thing I want is a product I actually want to buy. That’s a minimum of an mp3 digitised at 192Kb VBR with no DRM. That’s the point where the product is as good as something I rip myself from a CD. … And I can play it anywhere. On my home PC, on my laptop, my portable music player, my mp3 CD player, or in the car. Without jumping through the DRM hoops and with the ability to back it up.

At the top end, for me $0.99 (or whatever the UK equivalent is) per song is too much. I have to think about whether I want to blow $10 on this album instead of that one. At the bottom end, grabbing it for free from a p2p service means too much hassle in locating it, fixing the tags and file names, assembling the album and discarding the badly ripped or corrupted copies.

Some p2p services are better than others but as one wag put it, it’s hard work at below minimum wage.

Now, what I’ve discovered is: if I buy it from AllOfMp3.com [an indie music service killed by the Big 4] at $0.01 per Mb or about $0.06 per song, I don’t even think about the cost. $1 per album is so low that I’ll just do it. The end result is that I’m buying more music and listening to more music, and I’m actually spending more than I used to when buying CDs.

So for me, at least, the price point where I’ll switch from trying to get it for free and actually paying for downloads is somewhere between $0.06 and $0.99, or $1 and $10 per CD.

My guess is that for most people the point where they stop thinking about the price and download huge quantities is around $0.25 per song. I’m a cheapskate, so my personal boundary is probably $0.10. But I suspect the tipping point for most of us is a bit higher.

So, putting this together with the detail from The Long Tail, it seems clear to me that the best strategy for the music industry is to go flat out for scale so that the overheads drop well below $0.25. And then offer up everything they’ve got, even it only gets a couple of downloads a year.

Offer it at three price points:

• $0.50 for recent big name launches.
• Drop that to $0.25 for reasonably current releases after 6 months.
• And then sell everything else at $0.10 per song or $0.02 per Mb

From the labels’ point of view, this should look like Free Money. It’s from inventory that’s already covered it’s costs and wasn’t earning anything anyway.

And then we can all just forget about DRM, suing customers, price cartels and regional price differences.

And at that point maybe the p2p file sharing networks will just fade away because nobody can be bothered any more.

Now, someone go tell the Big 4.

JN

---

Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!

Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php

---

Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 10:36 am and is filed under Music, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 5160 times