Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a EMI takes the plunge
EMI have announced that they’re going into partnership with 20 net distributors to offer a paid-for music download service. All well, and good, but if the music industry had been on their toes for the past few years, rather than on the moral high ground hunting down each and every teenager looking for a copy of the new Linkin Park album on Audiogalaxy or Kazaa, this would have been up and running last century.
However, it’s debatable whether this new service will make much of a difference. EMI’s partners in this venture include Dotmusic, Freeserve, HMV, MTV and MSN (and, we’re willing to bet, a good few other three-letter acronyms on top), all of whom were involved in Digital Download Day. Two weeks ago, Digital Download Day managed to entice a whole 150,000 people into downloading tracks, giving each visitor 5 euros’ worth of free downloads. Given that over one million people visited the site, that’s less than a 15% hit rate. Bear in mind that that’s before any money was being demanded, and with the number of tracks downloaded running into the billions on unathorised sites, 150,000 looks pretty damned paltry.
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I’m starting to look at this in the same way as donationware/shareware/independently produced software - I religously pay for software of that type, and if independent record companies (the few that are left) or producers want to charge me for downloads, that’s fine by me. Whatever, you’re right - the only way this can work for the majors is by stamping out all the P2P networks, IRC, etc., which is impossible…
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Related: Australians face jail for a bit of filesharing.
“Police said the alleged piracy concerned music, album covers and music videos from Universal Music, Sony, Warner, BMG, EMI and Festival Mushroom Records. If found guilty of breaching copyright under the Copyright Act 1968, they would face up to five years in jail or a $60,000 fine”
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