Why don't you charge me a nickel to see one hazy picture of a porn star clothed?
You've got to get over this per track nonsense. The money is in the bundle. Otherwise, HBO would let you buy "Curb Your Enthusiasm" by the episode instead of forcing you to subscribe to 24/7 service.
Just because in past history people bought by the track, do we have to use this paradigm in the future? Shit, ask a kid about long distance telephone charges. My dad would freak, DON'T CALL LONG DISTANCE! But on today's cell phones, long distance is FREE! And speaking of cell phones, they don't charge you by the call, they sell you buckets of minutes. And for the heavy consumer, there are all you can eat plans. But in the music business, we're doing backflips about the ability to rent one shitty track at a time?
You want people to make one big decision. To subscribe to music! To get everything!
That's the Spotify plan, the MOG plan, the Rhapsody and Napster plan.
And credit Spotify and Rhapsody for knowing it's about portability. Check landline profitability recently? People are disconnecting, you don't need a wired phone. You want to be free and easy on the cell. Just like you want your music everywhere. That's now the challenge.
And no hard drive yet available can hold the history of recorded music. Ditto on flash memory. So, it's about being able to hear what you want when you want.
The iTunes Store is a stopgap measure, a bridge between old and new, a way to legitimize the chaos. But if you think people are going to be buying by track in the future, you purchase one egg at a time, you record every TV show to VHS tape, hoarding episodes clueless that there's something called Hulu.
Music should be like water. You turn it on, you expect it to be there. Everybody has access, you don't hoard it, and you pay very little for it. Sure, you can buy bottled water, but that's like going to the concert. You can't go to see everybody you listen to, not if you're an avid music fan, but you still want to check things out, listen to new favorites.
We've got a switch to an attention economy.
Sure, rights holders should be paid.
But individual acts should be worried less about being paid than whether they're being listened to!
Spotify Premium allows you to permanently store in excess of 3,000 tracks on your iPhone. So if you're out of range, or you're bounced by AT&T's shitty service, you can still listen.
Haven't we come up with enough concepts that please rights holders that the public doesn't find interesting? Look to Sony, they SPECIALIZE IN THIS!
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