How much is an hour of a pirate’s time worth, and can a label see itself as offering an efficiency gain to that person? If you could have iTunes automatically download every new album (and all the old ones) by every band you like for $20/month, why would you spend tens of hours a month getting/cleaning them all by hand from p2p? This is already a solved problem from a technical standpoint - if there can be podcasts then there can be “casts” for artist discographies, genres, producers, venues, moods, etc.

Huge hard drives almost eliminate the need to download anyway - AppleTV, Sonos, Pandora, etc. could ship a device with a 1TB hard drive preloaded with the top 10,000 albums as rated by users and metacritics - at which point a listener has instant, no-download, skip-around access to everything noteworthy ever recorded. Downloading becomes an automated background patching of the library with new releases rather than a means of discovering or “owning” music. A small device like iPhone could start with a cache of the most popular content and adjust by download after user feedback.

The listener thus shifts from allocating dollars to allocating attention. Enter Web 2.0. How will anyone figure out what to choose from this ocean of possibility? Semi-passively, through Pandora, or actively, through peer recommendations, metacritics, tags, advertising, live shows, Google? It may not matter much.

Music is already quickly becoming a background feature - inside MySpace, video games, cellphones on hold. The music industry will soon be struggling to get any revenue at all directly from the listener, but the sooner the old business model dies, the sooner we can get on with building cool offerings that somebody somewhere (probably advertisers) will pay for. As long as there is plenty of money coming in, and it gets spread around reasonably, it doesn’t really matter whether or not it comes from the end user - they can be monetized or they can pay, like Hotmail does.

If Yahoo and any other subscription is particularly successful, it will be particularly painful to the studios.

The old way of people paying for music is gone. Those who still pay, do it for moral reasons that they picked up as children. They were brainwashed to think they had to pay for this stuff, so they know no other way.

Have you ever seen a free newspaper? I suppose you have because they are everywhere and quite popular. All the writers who contribute articles in those papers get paid somehow or they wouldn’t eat.

Bands and groups will not go hungry. They will make money via concerts and advert revenue from the download pages.

Am I crazy or the only one who sees this? P2P is not going away. and will always thrive unless there is a legal means to getting the same value or better.

Isn’t this inherent to your (and every other subscription service’s) business model?”

Response:

Ian’s original post said “Labels and artists get paid for every radio play and every Yahoo! Music download to the Sansa Connect.”

I would assume in Ian’s comment, that “Digital Sales” is referring to sales from pay per song AND subscription services. Thus not leaving sales from Subscription services as a potential cause of the gap.

Most of the stuff on mp3 players (regardless of brand) aren’t legal. They weren’t paid for. Here’s some info: a lot of the highest-quality online rips were ripped by low-level studio employees *before* the release, so the artist didn’t even get paid for the CD.

If you seriously believe that most teens or young 20-somethings have mostly (or even partially) legal music on their MP3s, you really don’t understand youth culture today.

Itunes is the *last resort* for music, and it’s generally only used if the music can’t be found freely through LimeWire, BearShare, or Google.

Take that straw man!

No one is asking users to pay twice for music they ripped. However, I do use the subscription service on Yahoo as a way to download music I already on - it’s easier than ripping a CD.

I also use the subscription service to listen to music that isn’t worth paying for, which is most of it. I relate it to buying movies. where I rent much more than I own.

Misleading headline.

And I’ll let you know something else.

Right now the only serious buyers of music are the older generation like my parents. Sure there are kids buying CD’s, but a lot of them are now downloading it illegally. Now what happens when we replace our parents as the older generation (i.e. when we become 35+)?

If digital downloads haven’t caught up then that is when the music industry will be in pain. No longer will they have the older generation purchasing CD’s because as they grew up on MP3, they will still download their music.

My parents would rather purchase a CD because it is habit, it is the best quality and you get a physical CD to deal with.

The youth don’t think this way.

This is not a Yahoo device, rather it’s a San Disk device that has bundled Yahoo’s music service. However, you are free to load a variety of other music and from other sources. The hardware is based on the Zing platform, like the Sirius Stiletto. The Sansa Connect was on display January at CES and was pretty much mobbed. This is the first device in a long while that I’m excited to get my hands on.

Ian, in the quote’s actual words, implies that the HARDWARE is the issue here. It is the iPods that have the illegal music. The USER is the person who has the illegal music.

Thus, the “off-putting” of the comment comes with the insinuation that iPods are behind the “illegal music” instead of the user. He means, quite simply, to imply and dupe those who aren’t savvy enough that the iPod is - essentially - aiding illegal activities while their player is not. This is not the argument that should ever be made. It is the user, not the device, that uses their player (in this case iPod) to house potentially illegal music. The RIAA has yet to sue Apple’s iPod for copyright infringement. Instead, they sue the USERS.

So, while we have, in the comments, established that there is an age divide and that the comment is true of some USERS, the comment is still off putting and an untrue, misguided marketing slam.

Just remember it’s not the HARDWARE, like Ian says, but rather the USER - and some users at at that.

How hard would it be for Cingular and Motorola to get together to introduce a device that isn’t a cell phone but rather an MP3 player that runs over the Cingular’s network? It could have a mobile platform where the user could use Yahoo! Music or Rhapsody, etc. It could have an easy interface to stream things like Live365 stations. And it could have a micro-transmitter or adapter package to go in a car. I assume this has been thought of by thousands of people, yet I have yet to see a quality offering in the marketplace.

Isn’t this inherent to your (and every other subscription service’s) business model?

You charge $144-180 (and with current discounts much less) per year for an entire catalog, what someone would purchase over their whole lifespan. It’ll take you around 50 years more or less to offset physical loss sales with digital subscription revenues for each individual.

(In fact, I would imagine that if you just looked at the download to own market versus loss sales attributed to it, there may actual be a reall offset, maybe even revenue gain.)

But your model which you support on the claim that the music business is losing money actually fosters the music business losing money.

Did I see a proliferation of stolen music among my peers when I was in my early 20s? Absolutely. Do I see it now that I’m in my late 20s? No.

This is not to say that there aren’t exceptions. There’s always the self-rightgeous, tech-nerd crowd who’ll espouse “music wants to be free,” or some other non-sense argument. There are those who have the means and steal anyway because they’re just assholes. However, people generally want to do the right thing.

I contend the majority market of underground, free music is served by those who wouldn’t purchase the music anyway. The RIAA will never make more money by quashing it.

Circling back to the original argument about iPods mostly holding illegal music, if the iPod is owned by a 10-25 year old, I would say that statement is probably accurate. Over 25 iPod owners, not so much. And if you want to make an umbrella statement about iPods, if there are more 10-25 year olds who own iPods than over 25, then yes, iPods are “mostly full of not-paid-for MP3s.”

Wish you well with the device, but for the reasons I mentioned previously, for the same price I get more from my iPod.