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Bad news for the music industry
Jun. 25th, 2008 08:26 pmI was passing some time at the mall today, and stopped into a CD store for the first time in probably well over a year. I looked over a bunch of CDs, and found quite a few albums by artists I used to like but haven't listened to in quite a while. I briefly considered buying quite a few of them. However, I was stopped by the following thought process:
"If I buy the CD, I'll have to rip and encode it before I can use it, and then I'll have all these physical discs that I'll need to put into the CD binders, which will necessitate rearranging them, and then find somewhere to put the CD cases if I want to keep them. I'd like to support these artists, but it would be so much easier to just write down what I want and download it when I get home."
Note that I'm too picky for MP3 files or DRM, so my downloads have to be FLAC or other lossless files. And this means I can't use the paid download services; it has to be the Pirate Bay.
After thinking about the above, I realized two things:
1.) For me, at least, physical CD music has actually become an anti-feature. Getting the CD and box and booklet actually decreases the value of the music purchase. This is not good for the RIAA -- their "value-add" to the music production process is subtracting value from what the musicians have originally created. Anything they add to the base product (the music itself) lowers its value. I am not necessarily yet the typical consumer, but already I have no need and no use for recording companies. And eventually I will be the typical consumer.
2.) The above thought process is completely crazy. There is no good reason why, if I really don't want the physical CD around, I couldn't buy it, rip it to digital, and throw it away. But I won't. It's well established in psychology that people do this (any given thing is worth more to you when it's already yours -- the amount you'd be willing to pay for item x is less than the amount you'd charge for someone to buy that x from you) but that doesn't make it any less crazy. It's only when I do not yet own the physical CD that I intuitively recognize that it has negative value to me.
All this said, I discovered more music that I want but didn't know existed from browsing that store for a few minutes than I've discovered in years on the Internet. There needs to be an online way to replicate the music store browsing experience. The problem is that that's hard; it's like duplicating newspapers online. Both the newspaper and the music store give you vast amounts of data in a fashion where you can both rapidly scan it in aggregate and peruse it in detail, moving very quickly between levels of precision. Browsing music on Amazon or iTunes or reading the news on MSNBC is nothing like that.
"If I buy the CD, I'll have to rip and encode it before I can use it, and then I'll have all these physical discs that I'll need to put into the CD binders, which will necessitate rearranging them, and then find somewhere to put the CD cases if I want to keep them. I'd like to support these artists, but it would be so much easier to just write down what I want and download it when I get home."
Note that I'm too picky for MP3 files or DRM, so my downloads have to be FLAC or other lossless files. And this means I can't use the paid download services; it has to be the Pirate Bay.
After thinking about the above, I realized two things:
1.) For me, at least, physical CD music has actually become an anti-feature. Getting the CD and box and booklet actually decreases the value of the music purchase. This is not good for the RIAA -- their "value-add" to the music production process is subtracting value from what the musicians have originally created. Anything they add to the base product (the music itself) lowers its value. I am not necessarily yet the typical consumer, but already I have no need and no use for recording companies. And eventually I will be the typical consumer.
2.) The above thought process is completely crazy. There is no good reason why, if I really don't want the physical CD around, I couldn't buy it, rip it to digital, and throw it away. But I won't. It's well established in psychology that people do this (any given thing is worth more to you when it's already yours -- the amount you'd be willing to pay for item x is less than the amount you'd charge for someone to buy that x from you) but that doesn't make it any less crazy. It's only when I do not yet own the physical CD that I intuitively recognize that it has negative value to me.
All this said, I discovered more music that I want but didn't know existed from browsing that store for a few minutes than I've discovered in years on the Internet. There needs to be an online way to replicate the music store browsing experience. The problem is that that's hard; it's like duplicating newspapers online. Both the newspaper and the music store give you vast amounts of data in a fashion where you can both rapidly scan it in aggregate and peruse it in detail, moving very quickly between levels of precision. Browsing music on Amazon or iTunes or reading the news on MSNBC is nothing like that.
