record companies in Internet denial

If you're a fan of anything artistic or licenced and a user of the internet, then you know that licence vendors are in the throes of an everlasting seizure about what to do regarding content and the Internet. At the moment, we're in lockdown mode. If a video hasn't been licenced for your country, forget watching it. If Universal doesn't think your country exists, I hope you don't like music. Do you think that any self-respecting artist wants to keep their content away from customers? Not on your life. Artists are egotistical individuals, and they feed off credit and profit equally.

Amongst the many positive things you could say about the internet, the fact that it's made country boundaries borderline irrelevant is probably my favourite. You can communicate directly with someone from anywhere, and where they live doesn't come into it (unless they live in China). In fact, the only people obsessing over what country you're in are people who flat-out don't get it, or are stuck in an age where it actually mattered. Licencers are pretty much top offender on this one. They have a product that doesn't require any delivery charges, can be consumed pretty much anywhere that has a computer and a phone line and yet it's still more difficult for me to watch the latest season of Heroes when it first airs than it is for me to buy a teacup from the other side of the world. It ain't right.

Why is it taking so long for the recording industries of the world to capitalise on the Internet as a distribution platform. Not a week goes by when I don't hear that some company is in dispute with Apple over performance rights for song demos, or Spotify because they're broadcasting music that isn't licenced for a specific country (does that even make sense anymore?!). It seems that they're happier to chase down and try to punish the few than they would be squeezing money out of the many!

The main reason for this came from the BBC's commentary of Oinkgate (it's a pattern, and I'm sticking to it!). I learned something I didn't know about the site's "owner" - that he has/had around $300,000 sat in PayPal accounts. The upkeep for a site of that popularity isn't going to be cheap, so the fact that he was able to accumulate that amount of money and keep the site going is indicative of an ability to profit from this model (as an aside, if the owner of Oink was the scumbag, ripoff merchant he's being painted as, there wouldn't be $300,000 sat in PayPal account - it'd be sat on his drive. The fact that he didn't spend the money indicates to me that he was either undecided on what to do with it, or was rainy-day saving it. Well, it's raining pretty hard on him right now! If I'd donated any money to Oink, I'd be absolutely fine with it going towards his legal costs!). So, what we have here is a website with a (supposed...) subscription model and 100,000 users max, netting the owner of the site $3 per user profit. If you can't see where I'm going with this already, you may as well close the window now. All you need on top of that is track previews to see if what you're downloading is actually worth the money and you've got yourself a profiting business.

Now I realise that this sounds almost identical to Spotify, but with one important inclusion for me - the fact that my money got me something quantifiable. Spotify charges a lot of money (an amount that I'd be happy to pay for a good download subscription service, by the way) for what you get, and I think they'd give you more if they weren't being constantly hounded by record companies to stay within their anachronistic constraints!

In conclusion, recording industries of the world, stop fighting the people you rely on for money. If you're really about maximising profits, try giving us something that we actually want, for a reasonable price, for a change. You're never going to stamp out piracy, but when you try to make things harder for the pirates, you're actually making it harder for the people who legitimately acquire your product (see DRM, region encoding, copy protection, serial numbers, the list goes on...). If you need some help getting something started, I hear Alan Ellis, 26 is pretty good at this sort of thing.