Friday June 20
 
10:28
 
You Only Have Yourselves To Blame

From The Economist:

Global music sales took another tumble last year according to the IFPI, which represents the recording industry. A 34% increase in music sold online did little to compensate for the 13% drop in sales of CDs and music DVDs, which account for the bulk of the market. A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers forecast that spending on all forms of recorded music will continue to decline as youngsters turn to other outlets.

I didn’t pay for the new Coldplay album - I downloaded it from torrent.

Why did I do that? How can I justify such an illegal act?

Simple: with their last album - X&Y - Coldplay stole my money.

The only CD player I have is in my PC. I only listen to music on my iPod and iTunes. X&Y was copy protected which means I can’t play it on my PC, and I can’t rip it to iTunes. Price of CDs in Japan is almost double that of the UK, so I felt royally ripped off. The only way I could get the album into my iTunes without paying for it again was to download it from torrent.

The music industry taught me that if I want to play music on my iPod or on iTunes, I should not buy it - I should download it from torrent. Now that they’ve been so kind to teach me that, why should I return to paying?

By the same token, it is impossible for me to pay for DVDs anymore. The last time I tried to play a purchased DVD via my Popcorn Hour, it failed due to copy protection. I had to download from torrent instead.

Even without considering copy protection, it is still impossible. I move from country to country, and if I buy a load of DVDs in country A and then move to country B, there’s a high chance that country A’s DVDs will not play in a DVD player bought in country B…and country B’s DVDs will not play on my PC because it is set to the region for country A. There are hacks round this - forcing me to buy a “region free” dvd player or application - but why should I pay to see something I have already paid for?

The same mistake is happening with Blu-Ray. I already can download Blu-Ray movies and play them freely on my Popcorn Hour. Why would I pay for a Blu-Ray player that has region encoding and will prevent me playing via my media player? No reason.

Music and movie companies ought to stop moaning and do something pro-active. A good example is in Korea: very few people buy CDs, but almost everyone pays to have music playing as their “coloring” (cell phone ring) and background music on their Cyworld home pages. Stop whingeing and work out ways to earn money - don’t expect us to give up the ways you have taught us.