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Jupiter Report tells music industry to use MP3s
iceT writes "Jupiter Communications released a report that recommends that the Music Industry exploit MP3's rather than fight them. They also forcast that online digital sales will rise from 1.1% to 14% by 2003. Now, if the Music Industry will only listen." For those you not in the know, Jupiter is a bigwig research agency, and sponsers events like the annual Plug.In musical forum.
I think this is pretty on the nose. It's my opinion that the industry is not going to lose a whole lot of money to copying/piracy. They can't stop people from putting stuff on the web, but they can make it hard to find. The fact is that most consumers don't want to go hang out in #mp3warez or somewhere to find the latest pop tune. They will just head over to www.sony.com or wherever to pick up their songs. All the labels need to do is hire a few network savvy lawers to send out cease and desist letters so that the pirate sites have to keep their heads down. As long as pirate sites are hard for the masses to find, the masses will just buy the music on the official site. Just like with software. Last time I checked, the software industry was doing just fine despite the fact that it's trivial to pirate software. Even with sites like www.warez.com, getting pirated software is a pain in the ass. It's pretty much nothing but broken links and overloaded servers. Why should I spend two hours trying to find a working server with whatever new game is out, when I can spend five minutes having it FedEx'd to me? It's just not worth my time. If the software company is savvy and sells downloads of the program, I can have a legit copy even faster.
However, what is a threat to the music labels are the legitimate sites with MP3s. There is every reason to believe that www.mp3.com or some similar site will start taking market share and mind share away from Sony, BMI, and the others. While the big labels like to think that they are in the music creation business, it is more accurate to say that they are in the manufacturing and distribution business. There are lots and lots of companies and bands capable of making a studio quality recording of decent music. However, there are very few companies with the infrastructure to make millions of physical copies of that music and ship it to thousands of stores all over the world. Now that the Internet allows someone to dispose of the physical aspect of the music and just ship the bits around, the big labels are going to lose the edge that keeps them on top. I would hope that this is what keeps them awake at night, and that the piracy story is just a cover. However, you never know. Upper management may actually be so clueless as to think that they are in the "music" business and not the "manufacturing" business.