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File-Sharing Winners and Losers of 2005
An anonymous reader writes "A lot happened in the P2P world in 2005 according to Slyck news. From the article: 'BitTorrent soared to new heights while Steve Jobs enjoyed record breaking iPod sales. Yet not everyone shared this success. The RIAA continued its fight against P2P networking with little effect, as Sony-BMG disgraced itself and the DRM concept.'"
"The average consumer who has to deal with excessive DRM because of the losers above"
Actually no.
The record company's business model had traditionally been a pay-per-listen model. Unlike today, people just 100 years ago had no disposable income. Most people's thoughts were of having enough provisions to survive; the idea of a middle class with income to spend on luxuries is a 20th century ideal. Even then, the real middle class was largely a result of the consumerism buoyed by the end of WW2.
So prior to the 50's people couldn't afford record players or player pianos or other ways of listening to music. Live music, radio, and juke boxes were how the record companies grew up and the model there is you pay to listen. Every time (and yes, listening to a commercial is paying to listen).
Even as record players grew in popularity and dropped in price, people didn't have large music collections. They started to hear music on radio's and then would put a nickel in the jukebox to listen to it again.
The 50's and 60's brought an explosion of relatively cheap music, which from the RIAA's standpoint was a good thing. Those LP's couldn't be copied (except for a handful of geeks...er.... HiFi buffs who had a reel-to-reel recorder but with prices at several hundrew dollars, was hardly worth the effort.
But as the compact cassette (and 8-track) grew in popularity the apple-cart was upset. People could borrow albums from each other and they could make copies! Forbidden fruit. The idea that an LP was special and uncopyable was gone. The physical DRM scheme in place at the time was rendered useless for people who could afford a cassette deck. And they could. And they copied a lot. Sometimes, they'd do it so much the record companies would raid "trading parties" on college campuses. Still,it was not a big deal and anybody with a cassette deck would do "Greatest Hits" tapes or make copies of friends albums. For the first time, copying had a measurable impact on sales. Still, the record companies figured out they could sell pre-recorded cassette and so all-in-all things weren't bad.
Then the Audio CD came out and it was back to the old deal for the record companies. DRM. You couldn't copy a CD! Unless you were one of those geeks with a lot of time, a lot of brains and a few thousand bucks to buy recordable CD's, but that wouldn't come for almost a decade.
But when MP3's came out nobody would have heard of them except for one sly move by fraunhaufer... they started to give away command line versions of their MP3 player, and they turned the other was as people reverse engineered MP3. The cat was and is out of the bag, and this time, a change in format won't help primarily because once its on your hard drive, format is now irrelevant. The old days of a new format every 10-15 years is obsolete. So once you own music, you never buy it again.
Understand two things that are important. You must understand this or nothing good will every come of this:
1) The record companies still believe they are entitled to "nickel" every time you listen. Its in their blood.
2) The record companies have relied on format changes to encourage sales of a back catalog.
So from their point of view, they want DRM not only to limit what you can do with music, but they also want it so you have to buy the same music again in a few years as they obsolete the current format. Remember this: The DRM would exist on the music even if nobody was stealing it. It allows control and control is the important thini
I say this... let people copy as much as possible. Let congress pass the most draconian laws protecting music and film possible, because then people will finally get tired being screwed by the record companies and real change will happen.
But whining about people copying RIAA music for free? Its like worrying that its not fair that you steal from the corner drug dealer.