So I decided to listen to Don't Download This Song tonight.
Go on, click the link. Dare ya. Does it say "This video is not available in your country?"
Two possibilities: One, temporary screwup of whatever code youtube uses, in which case I will just wait and cancel the bitch session. Or two, it is more likely the music companies are coming down hard on internet video websites again.
Come on, do you really think I am going to run to your commercial site, download a clunky copyright-protected music player like Itunes, register my personal details and credit card number with you, and pay $2.99 (or whatever it costs now) for a song that was previously available, free for download, from the man himself?
Oh noes, I do not live in the glorious US of A. I have no radio license to listen to songs from the internet.
All you're doing is making me strike Youtube off my list, just like Napster and Pandora and Multiply, and go on a search-engine powered hunt for something else. (Right now, I'm listening to Weird Al on Myspace.)
Make it any more inconvenient to simply listen to streamed video, and I will end up where you don't want me going. Torrent hunting.
Because it is simply the easiest option once you kill everything else.
Why can't the record companies figure out what some other people have figured? If you've got a good product, you don't have to freak out over minor copyright infringement. Make it more easy and convenient to pay you, at a reasonable price, and a good number of people WILL pay you, rather than endure the hassle of pirating crap.
Look at Steam. It's this mega-mall of digital distribution. It doesn't put a proprietary stamp on the software it sells and say sorry, you can't back this up and play it offline. It makes it CONVENIENT and DESIRABLE for you to WANT to be online.
Instead of going through the hassle of backing up everything and copying it slowly to a new computer when you move comps, just install Steam and let it do all the downloading for you. Voila.
It offers bloody good games at bargain-bin prices during limited weekend deals. And boy, do they work a charm. Half-price L4D apparently netted them more $$$ than their opening week. I couldn't resist World of Goo and pretty much any other game that I ever wanted but didn't want to pay full price for. I'm probably not the only one.
I'm positive plenty of those games have bootleg copies of them floating around on the bittorrent nets. Do I care? No. For minor pocket change, easily paid with a credit card or via Paypal or multiple payment options, I get a legitimate game, peace of mind, and it self-downloads and installs itself for me.
And it doesn't care which country I'm in. It's happy to sell it to me. That's the convenience people PAY for.
Dr Horrible is available for free online. Fans have even bootlegged the commentary from the DVD track. It's just so bloody good, for a perfectly reasonable price ($10ish USD for 40ish minutes), from a website that actually acknowledges people not in USA exist (yay, Amazon), and so convenient to purchase (hell, you could one-click buy!)...
...Well, a copy is in my little grubby hands now and everybody's happy.
The more music companies try to clamp down on new means of distribution, in the hope of forcing everybody back to the old, inconvenient, exorbitantly priced methods...
...the more it's going to end up backfiring on them.
Stop pissing people off and let them enjoy good music, even if they don't live in your goddamn country. Yer not getting a cent from me by pulling this sort of crap.
1 comment:
So those are weekend deals...
I saw the half-price L4D and was going to buy it, but had to go out. When I remembered it and logged on to buy it, it was gone! :(
Can't really blame Youtube. Getting sued is serious business. You could end up having to pay millions of damage.
It's the record comapnies. And they don't pay their artists that much anyway, when you buy the CDs.
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