Category — music

It seems that various UK ISPs have signed up to a deal by which they’re obliged to ensure that their customers know that piracy is illegal; there are hints that they might be obliged to take a more active role in identifying file-sharers also.

Great. It’s the standard record industry “solution” to the problem: Ignore that people clearly enjoy sharing your product, and try to stop them from having any reasonable (and reasonably priced) way of getting that product. Spun a different way: If file-sharing is such a problem for your industry, doesn’t that scream to you that you’re lagging behind your customers, somewhat?

Now, I’d happily pay for the odd track here or there. Seriously, I would. If it was easy to do so. If it didn’t get in my way to do so. When I want to listen to one track, I go to youtube. To get that track any other way, I’d have to find an online music store I liked, register, sign in, register my card details, search, then download … by which point, the impulsive “I want to listen to this piece of classical 80′s rock right now” is but a dot in the rear-view mirror of my mind.

Okay, so how would you get money from me? It’s reasonably easy, actually, and the platform’s already there to do it. I’ll enumerate into easy bullets:

1. Pre-requisite: My browser would know my card details. Yes, I always hesitate when I have to find my wallet. I hesitate even more if I don’t trust the site to store my bank details.
2. Let’s say I want to listen to a track, so I go to youtube. I enjoy said track; there’s a link on the right of the video asking me if I want to download a good quality version of the original track for a small fee (say, 50p, 75p, 99p, whatever).
3. I click the link. Firefox happily informs youtube of my card details (after a clear, reasonable, and informative dialogue box asking if I want to continue); at a push, I have to enter the three digit code on the back. But preferably not; I’m lazy, and if I have to get up for my card, then I’ll probably find I’m just not that interested in listening to this song. You’ve just lost my impulse purchase.
4. I get asked by Firefox where I’d like to save the file. So I do. I get a receipt emailed to me, so I can re-download for 48 hours at no extra charge if I forget where I’ve saved it, or if I just opened it in my media player without saving.
5. I listen, and I enjoy.

Now, the difficult part is designing a hook on youtube to allow the many low quality rips of a song’s music video to point toward the album quality audio file of the same song. (Something like last.fm, or similar, could make this process easier, but they’d need to start carrying full tracks so I could stream once, then buy at a low, low prices if I wanted to keep.)

The key to this scheme is that I will listen to this song, and then fire the link off to a couple of people on my buddy list over MSN, Jabber, etc. Then they’ll be at the same page where I bought my track. Perhaps they’ll buy also. That’s three sales out of my one impulse buy. Perhaps they’ll forward the link too.

The record industry needs to figure out that if they made it easy to get money from consumers wallets into theirs, then illegal file sharing would drop off dramatically. Or at least profits would bulge enough that perhaps trying to monitor people’s internet service wouldn’t be necessary.