What part of this game do the record labels not understand?

A wack business model. Picture by Jrubinic

A few people emailed me asking what I thought about the new measures against pirates being taken in the UK. According to the BBC, six of the UK’s biggest net providers have struck a deal with the music industry to tackle piracy online. Hundreds of thousands of letters will be sent to net users suspected of illegally sharing music. I don’t comment on every single piracy story that comes up because I find so much of the action being taken so wrong-headed that it’s not worth discussing. I felt that this was one of those stories.

First of all, letter writing campaigns are for pressure groups and knitting circles, why the BPI is engaging in something this futile is beyond me. Competing with pirates has to be part of the equation, this is becoming widely accepted. Any company or industry pretending they can fight piracy with the law alone is going to find out the hard way that they cannot. The record industry seems to think this is a game of cat and mouse, when they are in fact playing wack-a-mole.

You can’t win this game with a big hammer, it just keeps going. The majors won’t beat music pirates by pretending the current legitimate methods of distributing recorded music are more efficient. On top of that, there are many ways around this type of snooping, such as encryption, Usenet, wifi leeching, USB transfers, switching to smaller ISPs, the list goes on. The pirates are always going to be a step ahead. In practice there are so many problems with implementing this, it doesn’t even sound workable in any way that won’t be a giant PR disaster for Ofcom, not to mention every ISP involved.

Musicians deserve to make a living like everyone else. But despite file-sharing, artists are making a living, many continue to make a very good living, and the rise of independent labels (which now accounts for 30% of the market in the US) suggests more people are making some sort of living from music now so many barriers to entry have been removed.

It’s not file sharing, it’s HBO.

All this talk of a music tax isn’t helpful either. But a subscription service not unlike HBO’s model in the States could be a good idea. Millions of people, me included, pay upwards of $20 for HBO on a monthly basis. I’m not sure exactly how much we pay for it in my house, but I know it’s more than I would pay in any other circumstances for the privilege of watching Norbit fifty times a month. But great shows like The Wire and Generation Kill, not to mention the convenience of having all that content in one place, means I’m happy to keep paying. In the long run I feel like I’m getting my money’s worth. HBO doesn’t just sell good content, it sells a good experience.

Giving people the option to pay $5 or $10 a month for all the music they can eat is the industry’s best shot at vanquishing the threat from pirates. There are some problems with this, common standards need to be in place, and a royalties system needs to be figured out, but while these things might be an administrative headache, they are by no means impossible. The majors need to develop a system or service based on the file sharing model the way Apple and Amazon have, but to compete they must go that extra step. The products need to be superior, the customer experience needs to be great but most of all the price needs to be right. They’ve already lost ground to incumbents like Apple, and the longer the focus stays on trying to stop individual fans from downloading, as opposed to innovating, the more ground they stand to lose.