I liked this piece from Business Week. My favourite bits:
...[T]he piracy problem is behavioral, not technological... Since Napster's rise, [Steve Jobs] has missed few opportunities to declare that he thinks the music industry stumbled big-time when it came time to figuring out an online music strategy. All along, Jobs has espoused an approach the makes buying music online easier rather than one that tries to make pirating it harder... The iTunes Music Store is a perfect example of this approach, with minimal antipiracy controls but a low-enough price that lots of people will feel they're getting a good deal when they click the "buy" button.
...Of course, the labels could try to keep the music within their own retail operations. But Jobs saw he could do it better and more easily than the labels. His big edge: The labels have been so busy promoting individual artists over the years that they never built a real brand name for themselves.
Joe Sixpack looking for tunes online gives a rip whether they're coming from Arista or Columbia. Chances are he doesn't even know who owns those labels. But he does know that he can download his Eminem fix at Apple.com.
Apple is heralding a new era of online retailing, where the retailers will have the same kind of brand recognition as Apple -- perhaps Amazon, eBay, or Yahoo!. The labels will from now on play this game at a distinct disadvantage not only because they lack a true brand name but also because they have forever lost control of distribution.
Yeah! :-)
Posted by timo at May 1, 2003 10:56 PM | TrackBack