We're now entering the next phase in the recording industry's fight for the control of music distribution. In this phase, the recording industry tries and fails to control distribution of copyrighted content with technology. Today I'll tell you why that's good news for IBM, why it's a doomed strategy and why it's the best they can hope for.
The three most important numbers in this debate:
- Music file-swapping site Napster has 51 million users
- Napster users buy less music, according to PC Data Online.
- Napster users are more likely to increase what they spend on music than non-Napster users, according to Jupiter Media Metrix.
In other words, people love getting music online, but nobody knows whether it's good or bad for CD sales.
IBM to the rescue
Tech news sites lit up this week with the news that IBM was trumpeting its new Electronic Media Management System (EMMS) technology. It does three things:
- Limits the use of a song after it has been distributed once
- Allows copyright owners to use different types of protection based on geography
- Creates plug-ins for RealNetworks' RealJukebox to allow direct sales and payment for music protected with the technology.
And IBM isn't the only one producing these technologies. Centerspan, which bought film and MP3 search engine Scour, will relaunch its own service with its own form of copy protection
A failed effort
It's easy to see why anti-piracy technology will fail to protect the record companies' control over distribution:
Consumer resistance. Consumers who already swap songs for free aren't interested in buying music that has limitations built into it.
Consumer belief. The Gartner group says almost a third of the people who download music from the Web believe it violates copyright laws. So one third of downloaders believe it's piracy and do it anyway, and the rest don't believe it's piracy at all.
Napster Alternatives. The latest version of Napster has a link to music sales site CDNow and is talking about launching a subscription service. But if Napster starts making it harder to download music, there are plenty of other places for file swappers to go, including Aimster and Gnutella.
Even IBM's tech guru concedes that the EMMS software is hackable. And once one song is hacked and stripped of its copyright protections, the music is loose and there is no way of getting it back. Period.
I'm not advocating piracy. But Napster altered the way we get music and it's too late to change that. The recording industry must do a better job of delivering music than Napster. And once it has mastered that, all it can hope for is the technology to make it harder for people to steal music they haven't bought.
Otherwise, consumers will just say no. Is technology the answer to the recording industry's problem? Hit the TalkBack button and tell me what you think.
This can benefit musicians greatly for they can now eliminate the middle man