Monday, January 29, 2007

How to stop music "stealing" ?

Long ago here's how it happened. Buy an album, put it in, and groove to your new treat. And as your sitting on that comfy sofa, listening to those booming speakers unleash fresh tunes, you skim the liner notes. It's simple, a standard music junkie experience.

And now with online music stores, what do we have? The same experience. Some, such as iTunes, are even beginning to offer digital music booklets, a newer version of liner notes. But why stop there?

1) Online music stores can attach almost everything they want to downloads. Album or song purchases should be attached to tour schedules, artist stories and biographies, videos, games, screensavers, drawings, desktop backgrounds, coupons, anything of interest.

2) Songs files can be made for more than listening.
Fans like to interact with their music. What if you could download a song file, and then sing karaoke with it, play the guitar solo from it in Guitar Hero, dance to it in DDR, create your own music video for it, remix it and resell your reproductions. All of these abilities in a single interface.

If an album offered more attachments and interactivity in a hard to reproduce environment, than fans would gravitate from "stealing" towards the superior product. Many people who download newly released movies still go to theaters for the experience—it's better.

The record companies can improve the music experience or they can spend their time catching clueless teenagers. Which do you think deserves more emphasis?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sorry mate,
but I don't consider paying for music as stealing. Especially when you add to the fact that a CD with it's shiney disk, plastic box and all the printing invoved in manufacture cost all but the same as a digital download which only provides you with the music. Are the so-called legal sites trying to fob us off with the idea that the music costs all the money and the factories used to produce the physical disks etc the transportation cost to deliver to shops, the shops markup and all the staff involved in this process add nothing to the cost, or, as I believe, we are being made to pay over the odds for music with comparitively negligable overheads, i.e a website and servers. Why is it that people in the U.K are constantly being ripped off when the U.S and Russia can get the same music much cheaper, hardly any wonder that people in the U.K only want to pay the same as other countries and not necessarily get the music for free from a peer to peer server. Have you ever seen a poor record producer or top artist, I put it to you, the companies selling us the music so-called legally are more interested in raking more profit in whilst giving the customer less and less.
The only way to stop people stealing music is to sell it at a realistic price like they do in Russia, people don't join allofmp3 to get music for free, they wish to pay what they consider a fair price .

Anonymous said...

Why don't you use sites like iomoio.com to buy music in UK? $0.15 per track and its legal according to Berne convention administered by the WIPO and WTO requirements.

Quote "...any country that is a signatory of the convention is awarded the same rights in all other
Countries that are signatories to the Convention as they allow their own nationals, as well as any rights granted by the Convention"