Quote:
Originally Posted by griffin8r
I'm not saying the pirates are right, I'm just saying the music industry has historically treated their customers like thieves, long before the internet existed....
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There is one part of history that you are missing, something really important that has changed everything:
The feeling of entitlement that younger people have towards music, the feeling that music should be "free".
It has taken an internet "generation" to go from Napster to web2.0, and in that time the systems of beliefs have changed dramatically. There are a significant number of people out there that think that anything that can be digitized should be free because with P2P and other means, they can distribute it for free, so why pay anything?
So yes, Itunes does good business, but it is a drop in the bucket. The most popular numbers I see kicked around says that 19 our of 20 copies of each song out there are pirated. That leaves a much slimmer business for the music world. When it comes to net sales (including Itunes) the record industry is taking in similar amounts of money today that it was in 1997, while inflation and whatnot has lowered the relative value of that income by nearly 40%. There is very little chance of an upside for the music industry any time soon.
Web2.0 is the land of the free. Everything is stolen, borrowed, hijacked, pirated, copied, virally spread and given away by everyone to everyone. Remember, price and value, while not always directly linked, are attached to each other with an elastic. When the price moves significantly lower, it drags down the value. At this point, music has no real market price, and very little value. It is very hard to re-create price when there is no more value.