Quote:
Originally Posted by RawAlex
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.
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This speaks directly back to the core of my argument. The record industry brought this down on their own heads by openly fighting what they should have known (based on their own experience with other media) was a lost war against
a delivery format.
There's no fixing this now, it's going to be a cycle of litigate one pirate out of business, another one with a more sophisticated, less centralized delivery vehicle pops up, lather, rinse, repeat.
What I'm saying is that they could have fixed the problem by bringing an iTunes site to market back when Napster was still Napster and Web 2.0 didn't exist.