I often read articles like „P2P filesharing doesn’t have impact on the music-industry: the music industry is just not able to find new business models“. I thought about that, and I found a point I can understand the industry spending millions on lawsuits against filesharing users.
One often brought argument is
„people are willing to pay for digital content, because in stores like itunes the quality of the content is great and the delivery is fast.“
Yeah, but: If a user can chose between a clean user interface, good quality, a big catalogue and if it’s free or he has to pay: he will chose the free version.
I came across coda.fm: a torrent site with an extraordinary clean interface, very good information about the artists, albums etc., common functions like „people who liked this music, also liked that etc.“. This is a threat to the music industry. When torrent sites start to act like coda.fm there’s no need anymore to go to a store and buy your content legally – or just because of the „legal“ reason. The music industry is fighting for that.
That’s why I don’t believe in concepts like Nokias „comes with music“ – every dataplan enabled phone is able to play last.fm which is perfect for my free preferred music on the go. But when I pay for music (and I actually do, be it a subscription or a pay-per-listen plan) I want to own it.
So, in some ways I can understand the industry: with torrent sites getting more and more „professionel“ I don’t see revenues for them anymore.