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Canadian record industry sees the light?

Michael Geist, a Canadian researcher at the University of Ottawa, summarizes a recent report by the CRIA. The study is ground-breaking as it goes contrary to the long-term claims of the record industry about mp3 downloads and their effects on record sales. The study found that P2P downloads only constitute 1/3 of music on people's computers, while the main source is still ripping CDs owned by the users. Also in the findings was that people who download most also buy most CDs.

Could it be that P2P downloads of music are actually not a threat to the music industry, but a nice new marketing opportunity? At least 2/3 of artists believe they benefit from music downloads, though the new technology might mean that the traditional record industry loses some of its control over the music industry. In any case, one has to really wonder if lawsuits against P2P downloading have really been a good PR move by the record industry. Taking one's potential customers into court can only serve to alienate them. The same with CD copy protection (even if we don't consider Sony's rootkit blunder) - this makes CD purchases less attractive to consumers, and pushes them into P2P downloads instead.

What's been happening in the music industry is another example that corporations which fail to adapt to the free and unrestricted Internet style service concepts risk their business withering. Today's consumers don't want to be limited by what's offered by technology vendors, operators and content providers. They want to use the latest technology to its best potential and get value for their money. If companies can create this kind of markets, they will see strong growth coming from various new opportunities on them. PC based Internet (eg. web 2.0) is the prime example of this kind of a market, and one of the reasons why users have been slow to migrate from this market to mobile 3G services has been the restricted nature of the latter - the so called walled garden concept, where operators limit the access to Internet and 3rd party services in the greedy hopes of creating huge revenues on users who are locked into their own vertical services.

Technorati tags: p2p, download, mp3, record industry, Internet, service

posted by Varis @ 13:09