QTrax is a startup that allegedly had agreements with three large record labels to allow legitimate, free and legal music downloads for users via Peer to Peer (P2P) technology. The blogosphere buzzed about it, then once they found out the deals fell through, the recanted twice as fast.
[Qtrax Really Blows Its Launch, Link via Techmeme]
However, this small battle doesn’t justify declaring a total loss on the war against consumers with digital media. I think this illustrates that there’s still a strong interest among internet users to acquire legally-obtained music for free, in exchange for advertisements being shown. This service would be a direct threat to Apple’s iTunes, but I imagine that it would allow music companies to capture lost revenue from otherwise illegal downloads.
The main problem, which I can understand, is lack of accountability. Most numbers that are tossed around are purely anecdotal and speculative — think of “cooking the books” — in favor of getting deals from record companies. From the record company’s perspective, they’re spending money to “invest” into a new media with minimal proof that it made profit. At least with iTunes, they can keep track of inventory. Much like in court, prosecutors can’t prove that you didn’t do something, only that you did beyond a reasonable doubt.
I conclude with the fact that consumers are still in control. Music lovers will declare whether it’s profitable to go free. Users are ultimately the ones who pay. Is free P2P music sharing doomed, or is there still an opportunity yet to be seized?
“Cooking the books” is right! These aren’t downloads- they’re temporary, ad-supported rentals! They can be played a pre-defined number of times within the industry’s pre-defined playback software- and can’t be transferred to a hard drive or music player (at least not within the bounds of the TOS). They’re shackled with DRM six ways from Sunday; and although pretty much every single savvy user on the Internet knows how to strip that DRM off this music, the whole package kind of defeats the point. The corporations are pathologically unable to resist injecting their old-business DNA into the new-business organism of Internet-distributed music.
They want to reach these savvy users; but they can’t check their control issues at the door. Even here, we have proprietary plugins, limited playbacks, and deliberate noncompatibility. This is not the sea change many are claiming- this is more of the same; and more of the same in a more disgustingly obvious way than ever before.
I encourage everyone who has been “stealing” music since the early 1990’s when this business model first failed, to continue “stealing-” Continue downloading everything, discarding and disparaging those acts you didn’t/don’t like and (more importantly) supporting those artists which you like through donations and concert/merchandise sales- and let the corporations flail and writhe in agony during their death throes.
These people (the corporate mouth-breathers) have their “prestigious” college degrees because their parents were alumni at these reprehensible institutions and they got free admission to the gravy train. They participated in the circle-jerks and racist pledge antics that the rest of these privileged elites did. They deserve what they get from the destruction of their unnatural business model- they deserve the squalor and poverty that they have inflicted on so many over the years in the name of the “free market” blessing them with obscene profits… I hope every who reads this downloads a song or two. Or fifty. Or fifty thousand.
Junkyard Willie
January 29th, 2008