Online music sales, copyright, media aren't my main focus as a CIS Fellow, but I do burn a fair bit of time exploring the issues. I recently designed some micropay techniques that might help the matter a bit, leveraging behavioral econ and regular econ and some other stuff (it's not going to market for now, so more on that some other day)... the matter is complicated. The industry doesn't want to kill itself by accident, but has also been reluctant to even experiment with anything other than more-restrictive technologies, which we know by now, really annoy people. Annoyed people aren't good for business.
Jack Valenti spoke to us at the Media Lab a couple of years ago. He said a bunch of things that didn't make economic, technological, or social sense, then participated in a now-legendary interview with The Tech, MIT's campus paper. I am loath to ever naively and arrogantly suggest that an entire industry "doesn't get it" but Valenti + RIAA + this week's news of an unimaginably fan-hostile "usage guidelines" document hidden in the packaging of the new Coldplay CD seem to beg for that naive conclusion. Coldplay? I thought those guys were young, enlightened, the future of music...
Ashlee Vance, writing for The Register from Mountain View, nails the current sad state of commercial media in a recent column:
2005 proved one thing. The music industry really is as dumb as you think.
US CD sales in 2005 fell 3.5 per cent year-over-year, according to Nielsen Soundscan. That's quite a blow given that CD sales actually rose by 2.3 per cent in 2004. A sane person might suggest that higher energy costs throughout 2005 ate up a few of those sales or that pricey iPods left less cash to spend on albums. This logic escapes the Recording Industry Association of American (RIAA), which again attributes the fall in sales to piracy and which last year attributed the rise in sales to better anti-piracy measures.