The Paying Consumer's Perspective
Faced with the threat of lawsuits by the RIAA and other copyright holders, many users have left the illegal download community. 38 percent of those who download music say they download less because of RIAA lawsuits. ( Ranie et al.) They have sought legal alternatives for obtaining and listening to digital music. Many such services exist.
The Options
There are two types of legal online music systems. The first is subscription services. For a monthly fee, users have access to a large library of music. They can listen to as many songs as they like, but usually cannot obtain songs in portable forms such as burned compact discs or unencrypted MP3 files. They can only listen to a service’s music for as long as they hold a subscription.
The other system is online music stores. These allow users to download music in portable forms for a fixed price per track or album. Prices range from 5 cents to 99 cents per song. Users are often allowed to burn CD’s of the music they purchase or upload it to personal music players.
Both music systems have advantages and disadvantages. Subscription services offer a low price for the use of a library of half a million songs or more, but they only exist as long as users pay a subscription and are not very portable. Music stores offer users a chance to "own" songs instead of just listening to them for the period of a subscription, but acquiring a library of 1000 songs could require just as many dollars. Some companies offer combinations of both systems. All forms of online music systems come with strong copyright protection technology to ensure that users do not "overstep" the personal use rights granted to them.
Many consumers have chosen to use both types of online music systems instead of peer-to-peer file sharing systems. 17 percent of all consumers who download music use paid services. (Ranie et al. [link: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Filesharing_April_04.pdf ]) The iTunes Music Store has sold over $70 million in songs; Napster’s subscription service has made $9.7 million in subscriptions.
(from Reuters)
Advantages
· Convenience
Users may purchase or listen to music without ever having to make a trip to a record store.
Users can sample music before they buy it.
Pay systems deliver songs that are complete and use high quality compression. Peer-to-peer users often have to sift through corrupted, incomplete, low-quality files.
Because fewer users have it, obscure music is hard to find on peer-to-peer networks and even harder to download. Pay systems allow users to download any song quickly.
· Legal security
Users of pay systems are acting within the accordance of the law; copyright holders cannot sue them.
Many pay services offer extensive personal use rights, including the right to burn songs onto CD’s. Users may listen to their music on multiple devices and computers legally.
· Ethics
Many peer-to-peer users download and listen to copyrighted music for free. This is enjoying the work of performers, songwriters, sound engineers, and other music professionals without compensation. Users of pay systems know that some of their money is going to the artists whose music they enjoy.
Online music systems have the potential to cut out “middlemen” in the music industry—CD manufacturers, distributers, and sellers—that take a large portion of profits from each sale. More of the consumers’ money can go to the people who deserve it: the musicians.
Users of pay systems aren’t breaking the law.
· Cost
Online music stores offer digital albums for less than their physical counterparts.
Consumers can buy single tracks instead of buying entire albums just for one song.
Several subscription services offer unlimited listening to a library of more than half a million songs for less than ten dollars a month.
Disadvantages
· Inferiority to compact discs
Digital music may include cover art, artist biography, and other information, but consumers can only enjoy true liner notes when they buy a compact disc.
Professionally-created compact discs are more robust than discs burned by consumers and can play in old compact disc players.
Pay services restrict the use of the music they offer. Consumers can rip CD’s to MP3 format and do with them as they please.
Compact discs offer uncompressed audio; files or streams from online services use compression that is “lossy.” Lossy compression removes nuances in audio in order to save space, but this loss is noticeable.
· Cost
Obviously, legal music systems charge fees, while peer-to-peer file sharing networks do not. It will always be less expensive to get music illegally.
Online vendors offer used compact discs at prices that rival the cost of albums from music stores.
· Unfair distribution of profits
Pay systems claim that digital sales mean that artists get a bigger chunk of the profits. The record companies get more of the profits, but how much of this they pass on to their artists is determined entirely by contracts. In the case of iTunes, 8 to 14 cents of each 99-cent song purchased goes to the artist. (Downhill Battle)
