(no subject)

[mmcirvin]

Mark Kleiman's guest blogger Michael O'Hare (hey, remember him from Babylon 5?) posts some thoughts about the music industry, and makes a (partial) error that I've seen many times before:

The key image of the current crisis, I think, is the completely implausible business model of the amazingly successful iPod: (i) you buy a player that holds 10,000 songs for a couple of hundred dollars and then (ii) fill it with music from iTunes or legal, purchased CDs (iii) at a dollar a song, for about $10,000. At least part of this scenario has never actually occurred. 20 million-odd iPods are sold every year; guess which part.

I know it's hard for some people to believe, but many people who have these things really have spent several thousand dollars on music. They already spent it before they bought the player. They're mostly ripping an existing CD collection that they had before the MP3 revolution started. It may not be 10,000 songs, but I suspect that many of the large-capacity MP3 players out there, especially the ones bought as gifts for older casual listeners who don't know Ogg Vorbis from a hole in the ground, actually have a lot of empty space on them and a few hundred legally ripped songs filling the rest.

Of course, that still means that selling an MP3 player doesn't get anyone an additional $10,000 of revenue. Buying one often is the gateway drug to downloading lots of stuff off KaZaA or whatever, and there's probably also a demographic gradient, with younger listeners who grew up with MP3 downloading more and ripping less. The industry's business model really is broken.

But I get annoyed by the assumption in articles on digital music that, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, the industry is entirely based on copyright violation. To ignore the fact that many people are extracting added value from their existing, legal music collections (and that this probably irritates the music industry as much as copyright violation does, because they're not getting extra money for that extra value, as they did back in the day when they could change physical formats and resell the same albums over and over) is to miss something important.

Comments

[jwgh]

Yeah, I have 5800 songs in iTunes. Virtually all of them are from CDs I bought in college ten years ago, and if I actually ripped all of the CDs I own in any kind of systematic way I'm sure I would have well over 20 gigs of mp3s.

[jwgh]

Er, actually it looks like I have 24 gigabytes of music now, so if I really ripped all of my CDs I would probably need a new hard drive.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

I'm with jwgh; when I got my MP3 player, I ripped my CD collection and filled the 20 GB drive.

It's not even all that many CDs. A couple hundred CDs will fill a 20 GB player. If you've been buying music for 20 years (say, you're in your mid 30s and you started buying in your teens) then buying 10 CDs a year -- less than one a month -- will fill your iPod. If you're at all serious about music (or ever went through a stage when you were serious about music) then you could easily have many hundreds, or thousands, of CDs.

[jwgh]

I think I have stopped buying as much music as I used to, although I still buy the odd CD or song from the Apple Music Store, but if that's true I think it's because I now have extremely easy access to the music I already own. If iTunes tells me that I currently have over sixteen days of music on my computer is it really that necessary for me to buy more? Not unless it's something pretty extraordinary.

[ckd]

Yeah. I started buying CDs in 1986 or so. I've filled a good-sized wall unit and still have stacks of them that need to be stored somewhere. That's why I was happy to upgrade my iPod from a 30GB to a 60GB.

Also, $1 per song? Heh. I've paid under $1 for entire CDs at times (usually crappy ones, but hey...). Boston's full of used CD stores....