Copyright Police Backing Down?
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is the epitome of the copyright police in the western world. Imagine having the tenacity to uphold copyright strictly even if it meant suing 90-year old grandmas and 13-year old schoolgirls for downloading music free online (even if it’s sometimes not their fault). Imagine employing bully tactics even to the extent of suing a family that doesn’t even own a computer!
The RIAA has been hailed as the music mafia. But they’re here to stay, and it’s quite hard to fight the 900 pound gorilla with brawn. It seems, though, that the RIAA is flinching from its original stance that all free music downloads are bad. They’re finally willing to admit that people who share music online must be great music fans and probably a great market, too!
[I]t’s almost funny to see the Wall Street Journal with an article about how record labels are finally admitting that file sharing is a way to market to the biggest music fans (found via Broadband Reports). While it’s laughable that it would take the industry this long to even venture to admit what was obvious to most everyone else, it is a tiny step in the right direction. Combined with the recent admissions that DRM can be annoying, that you can make money without DRM and that you have to compete with free content, it seems like the entertainment industry is finally starting to put together all the little pieces that lots of other folks tried to tell them seven years ago.
And this is rightly so. I would tend to think the RIAA is still living in the stone age with how it views business. What can we expect from the same kind of people who opposed VCRs due to fears of movie piracy (that was the RIAA’s cousin, the MPAA)?
In fact, many in the music and recording industry–particularly the independent artists–are now turning to alternative business models, which take into consideration the popularty of online music sharing. Remember MySpace? This social networking site, which was bought by News Corp for a whopping $580 million (not as whopping as Google’s $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube, but still a big amount!) last year, started out as a place for new, unsigned bands to share their music. And it has proven to be popular. MySpace is said to be the site with the most traffic lately. And it would make sense for people in the music business to market their stuff on such a site. After all, if you’re a relatively unknown band, what chances do you have in competing with the big names that have contracts with the big record labels using the traditional methods?
As for the business model? I think free is the operative word here. While a lot of people would be willing to pay 99 cents per tune, a helluva lot more would be going for something free. And just how can one earn from free? Easy. There are ads and sponsorhips. And for artists, I think making one’s work available online would be a great marketing tool for getting signed on to gigs, concerts and other potentially revenue-generating activities.
Sure, a lot of sites that offer legal music downloads are popular–like iTunes and Yahoo! Music. But I think pretty soon, the world will be seeing free legal music downloads as the norm.
[tags]copyright, DRM, RIAA, music, downloading[/tags]
