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Easier Streaming Services Put Dent in Illegal Downloading (bbc.com)
Music piracy is falling out of favour as streaming services become more widespread, new figures show. From a report: One in 10 people in the UK use illegal downloads, down from 18% in 2013, according to YouGov's Music Report. The trend looks set to continue -- with 22% of those who get their music illegitimately saying they do not expect to be doing so in five years. "It is now easier to stream music than to pirate it," said one survey participant. Another respondent said: "Spotify has everything from new releases to old songs, it filled the vacuum, there was no longer a need for using unverified sources."
No news here. We've known this at least ever since Steve jobs pointed out that the biggest competition to digital music isn't other outlets but digital "piracy". iTunes was the first viable option that showed you could do it better. And they did make a huge step forward.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Most people don't want to "own" movies. The watch them, then they really don't need to see them for years. That's why cable,TV, and Netflix works as a model.
For many people music is the same way. How many times are you really going to listen to that same song?
Spotify is $10 a month for unlimited music
average music album is $10
I'll take spotify if i want to listen to new music and not be like old people who listen to the same old stuff
How many times are you really going to listen to that same song?
Just as I've done all my life: as many times as I freaking want to, without worrying about whether I have a network connection and without getting billed for it each and every time, thanks very much.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Of course, digital music is a rare place of relative sanity in the realm of digital entertainment, where *if* you do actually choose to 'buy' a song, odds are it is drm free and not outrageously expensive.
Movies and books have download editions that are frequently *more* expensive than getting a physical copy of the same data, and are encumbered by drm on top of that.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This. You can still own the music you want to own. But now you can also listen to and discover a shit ton of different stuff without having to pay thousands of dollars a year... or, you know. Pirating.
IMO, ownership isn't the answer to everything. When I was a kid, I could scrape together the $8 or $9 bucks to buy an album (this was a long time ago, obv.) maybe six times a year. Off to the record store. Hours spent looking at the covers of hundreds of records, hoping to God I could figure out which one was worth my paltry allowance simply by looking at the cover art. Album purchased. Go home, listen to ten songs until the needle wears a hole in the record, or, just as likely, regret that I just bought an album I didn't like very much.
Today, I pay $15 a month (in today's money) for a family Spotify account. Me, my wife, and my two kids probably listen to at least a hundred bucks worth of new albums (in 1984 dollars) each month. I can go back and sample a half dozen albums from an artist I like without having to shell out only to discover that I've wasted my money. I can introduce my kids to entire genres without breaking the bank. My daughter can hear six versions of the piano piece she's studying. That's not mere convenience. It's musical wealth, for cheap.
// This is not a sig.
Today, more than ever, there are tools to understand the user, and their desires, in alarmingly graphic detail.
This is both good, and bad, from both ends of the producer-consumer spectrum.
From the producer side, it utterly DESTROYS deeply cherished misconceptions about what the consumer actually wants, or what drives their purchases (and their lack of purchases.) For example, the time-honored canard of "Pirates just want artists to work for nothing!" and pals. No-- research has shown, REPEATEDLY that this is not the case. The pirate just does not want to deal with the obstructions of your distribution model.
From the consumer side, the analytics tools are seen as highly invasive, and downright creepy, even though they leverage public datasets, and group behavior models, rather than specific data in many circumstances.
But, like it or not, there is no denying the power of data driven marketing and service providence.
As was pointed out when Netflix hit the scene, Netflix alone did more to eliminate movie piracy than any hairbrained scheme created by the RIAA and its constellation of associate organizations ever did, using any of their technological "solutions" at that time. The reason was because access was greatly increased, cost was very affordable, and (at the time) anything you could not stream, you could rent by mail with little personal financial risk if you failed to return the disc.
Naturally, the response of the media industry was "Kill Netflix!", which they have been attempting to do ever since.
The simple truth of "Pirates are customers who wont put up with your obstructionist bullshit, but are perfectly OK with paying for a-la-carte for bulk anytime access, and overall, consume more media then their peers, and will make more aggregate purchases." is readily apparent, and has appeared every time this kind of thing is 'tested' in the market; Every time it has been shown that when this is done, piracy dries up to a tiny fraction of prior incidence rates, with a strong coordinating relation to convenience+pricepoint.
The elephant in the room, is that the 'desire' to force consumers into deals they do not wish to participate in (eg, via region restriction lockouts, DRM, and a host of other bullshit--- to generate artificial scarcity, to drive up unit prices artificially above what the consumer genuinely wishes to spend by exploitation of a monopoly status-- eg, such as via copyright) is stronger than their desire to actually make money.
In this era, we understand the consumer to an alarming degree.
The producers should use the same data driven mechanisms to scrutinize THEMSELVES, and let go of these tired and moth eaten ideas. I suspect that they are afraid of what they will find, given how intently they have been at ignoring what their consumer marketing research has shown them for the past 2 and a half decades, as it relates to piracy.
You can still buy the albums. This is just another choice.
For someone like me who is musically clueless, this is a great service. No commercials and I don't have to know what I like beforehand.
Yeah! I bought one Milli Vanilli gramaphone record back in the 90's and I've been listening to it ever since,
You and me, Zontar, WE are the REAL cool kids!
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
But it's not all crap. Yes, most the pop music is crap but when was that not the case? There are music gems of all genres for all times; including now.
I found that when I was buying music I was spending more money and listening to less "new" stuff, e.g. music I had not heard before. For example in the last couple weeks I discovered Green Day's When September Ends, came out in 2005 but because I was limiting myself to what I had in my library I didn't fall in love with that song until now. By using a streaming service I'm able to introduce myself to more music without having to buy it, yet I know/assume that the artists that I listen to frequently get paid more then those that I listen to only a couple times.
If you want to buy all your music that's fine. All that really matters to me is that the content creators get paid for what they produce. But there are valid reasons to prefer streaming over purchasing.
I'll continue with the "consumable" model of Netflix because of their strong consumer-centric approach, pricing, and execution. If it's not on Netflix, it's getting pirated. Period. I don't subscribe to streaming music and continue to obtain what I want through alternate channels because the pricing and service models are garbage. The same goes for movies and television -- GoT, Westworld -- I still watch them, but HBO's long history of overpriced mediocre service and not syndicating content with peers means I won't give them my money.
By the same token, if Netflix pulled a Google and started to slip into pure, obvious evil, they're out as well, and every content producer can be assured piracy will tick back up. I know I would at least and it would be a bit of a movement.
A more interesting take on ownership would be the discussion about owning purchased content (e.g. Amazon Prime purchased movies) via a trust. Can we have content CO-OPs?
99% of the new music today is garbage.
They've been saying that for longer than you've been alive and they'll be saying it long after you are dead. Cute that you think you have some sort of revelation there. My grandparents thought my parent's favorite music was utter drek too and your kids will think your music sucks. A lot of it is crap of course but the funny thing is that we can't quite agree on exactly which bits are the crap.
We have a 100% blues/jazz low power station privately funded, with ZERO commercials that I listen to 99% of the time any more.
So you have very specific tastes and think anything else must be crap. Not true of course just like it wasn't true 50 years ago and won't be true in another 50 years. I have my favorite genres and artists too but just because I don't enjoy it personally doesn't mean others can't/won't.
oh no, not people making economic decisions based off their particular use cases and amount of disposable income! the horror! the horror!
Movies are one thing. They are an investment in the time you need to spend to actually enjoy them, and you watch them for the story - a story it is easy to remember.
All entertainment is an investment of your time. If you choose to multitask while enjoying some media then that's fine but you still are spending time on it no matter what the form of entertainment is.
Music, on the other hand, is something you listen to while doing other thing
Maybe YOU listen to it that way but I do not. When I listen to music I really listen to it. Having it just playing as background noise I find to be terribly distracting and irritating. I'm not saying you are wrong to listen to it however you prefer but don't presume that your preferences are universal.
you can stop in the middle of a track without feeling like you've just wasted your time by not getting to the end.
I do that all the time with movies and TV shows. I'm guessing you don't have kids if you are bothered by being interrupted. Heck DVRs are a god send if you have a busy life.
Also, people like to sing along to songs they know which gives music a lot more replay value than a movie.
Hogwash. People quote movies all the time and rewatch them regularly. What do you think people do with all those bluray disks? I can probably quote you every line of the Princess Bride or Star Wars (classic of course) or Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Heck there are some fans who go every week to re-watch Rocky Horror and dress up and recite/sing along. I rewatch movies more often than I listen to any given piece of music but that's just me.
I think this is highly controversial. Sure, there's one school of thought that says if customers wave their money in your face, you should take it. But there's another that says at the first sight of a customer's money, you should angrily shout "get away, you piece of shit!" and then and spit in their direction, in order to maximize profits. This latter point of view is very popular and especially in the entertainment industry, but I think it doesn't get explained well enough in economics classes. Our society needs to do better.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
a $10/month subscription ...
... is actually a LOT cheaper
in addition to all of your personal information.
Is it?
I don't respond to AC's.
Think of the value of research. Nobody can do it for you. If you don't do it, then you will miss all the good music.
Every piece of music that you think isn't crappy, you heard for the first time, somehow. How did that happen?
Whatever your strategy of old, you can implement it even better, faster, cheaper, and with wider scope in 2018 than you could in 1988. It's not that anyone disagrees with Sturgeon's Law, it's that people find ways to lower its relevancy and impact. You can listen to a fuckton of music that isn't mostly crappy, where far less than 98% of your time is wasted. You can get your waste down to, I bet, around 50-67%. And that's just when you feel like researching! When you're done "working" and just wanna have a beer on the patio while rocking out, you can still drop the research and FIRE FOR EFFECT (i.e. play carefully-selected favorites) just like you do now. But you'll have a larger and more diverse collection of good stuff.
2% of music is more than you have time in your life to listen to, even if you never repeat a single song. It's a ripe resource and worth finding. You sound like someone who has given up on one of the best things in life.
How many times are you really going to listen to that same song?
Just as I've done all my life: as many times as I freaking want to, without worrying about whether I have a network connection and without getting billed for it each and every time, thanks very much.
Meh. If I want to listen to a song without a network connection, I just hit "download", and then it's on my device. Actually what I really do is hit the "Thumbs up" button, and I have the auto-generated thumbs up playlist set to download. So if I get a new phone, I just have to hit "download" on the thumbs up playlist and pretty soon I have my whole collection available for offline listening with almost zero effort.
I don't get billed for each time I listen to a song. I pay a flat monthly fee, for which I have access to basically all published music. Whatever I want to listen to, I can. If it's not already downloaded I'll have to have a network connection, but I nearly always do.
I used to say that subscription music services were stupid and swear that I would never use such a thing. Then I tried it, and now I can't imagine ever going back to buying albums. It's not just the convenience, it's the freedom to listen to absolutely anything I want to, even something I haven't bought because I'd never heard of it until two seconds ago. If I'm walking around and hear bit of a song I like, I can listen to the whole thing, or the whole album, or the artist's entire discography. Streamed or downloaded, my choice.
Subscription music is awesome. Yeah, I have to pay every month, but I end up spending roughly the same amount of money on music as when I was buying a few albums a year. And I get so much more music, so much more conveniently.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
An email address and a method of payment? Having CDs shipped to your house requires "them" to know more about you. I guess you could buy all your CDs at Walmart with cash, but that's getting pretty paranoid.
Just as I've done all my life: as many times as I freaking want to, without worrying about whether I have a network connection and without getting billed for it each and every time, thanks very much.
If you are trying to assert that you have more freedom to listen to music that you've bought on a CD or ripped or something that's of course false. If you are a hoarder though I can see the attraction of having a bunch of CDs piled up on a bookcase.
The times when people are out of network coverage are offset by the requirement to load bits onto a music player of some sort and the obvious capacity limitations of said devices. Regardless the music service I use has offline downloads. I suspect they all do.
The streaming service I use costs less than a single CD per month. So for the price of one CD I (and all my family) get access to what is essentially all CDs, ever.
Is it possible that in some dystopian future where all network infrastructure and digital media is destroyed that you'll still have your music, and I won't? Sure, but to be honest access to music is going to be one of the last things I worry about. I also wonder about a situation where network access and computers are destroyed but CD players work fine.