  Jason Levine Premium join:2001-07-13 USA
| reply to Nightfall Re: Bad Article, Poor Advice
said by Nightfall :I agree, the **AA shot themselves in the foot on the download services being reasonable. Imagine how successful they would have been if they launched an allofmp3 like system? If they would have added more features to the CD to make it more price friendly, it would have been a win/win. As it is, they didn't do that so these things exist. Back during the heyday of Napster, I thought the recording industry should team up with Napster and build an online music store. The idea would be to limit the bitrate of the "free, shared" music. Say 96kbps tops. Then they would sell higher bitrate (and more reliably produced) versions for differing prices. The higher the bitrate, the more it would cost. (Of course, all of the songs would be reasonably priced. It would just cost more for more quality.)
They could have thought of the free, low bitrate songs like radio copies. Free publicity. Sure, some people wouldn't buy the higher bitrate copies, but some people are content to listen to music on the radio and never buy the CDs. Many more people would be likely to hear the low quality version and decide to buy a higher quality version to keep.
Instead, they decided to stomp Napster out of existence and in doing so provided the climate for the P2P apps to develop. Finally, after many years of fighting music online, they finally figured that they could benefit from online music, but even now they seem to regard online music as a bastard child. Something that should be dealt with with a wary eye and kept as hidden away as possible lest some embarrassing questions be asked. |