6
Why pay for MP3s, when you can P2P?
Mp3 player headphones on a keyboard
To view this content, Javascript must be enabled and Adobe Flash Player must be installed.
TEXT OF STORY
Tess Vigeland: You don't ever want to get a letter from a media company ordering you to cease-and-desist your illegal downloading. Trust me. Not that I'd ever do such a thing.
But certain members of my household think it's downright silly to pay for things you can get online for free. Like Season Four of "Friday Night Lights" before it aired on NBC. And in fact, if you turn the argument on its head, why are millions of people still paying for the same music and movies they could get for free?
It's a question that prompts us to ask...
Comedian:What the hell were you thinking?
What were you thinking? Our look at why we do what we do with our money. Joel Rose explores the decision to pay or pirate.
JOEL ROSE: My friend Katie went to college in the late 1990s, when just about everyone she knew was using Napster, or something like it, to download music. But Katie never did.
Katie: It's simplistic to just sort of go to the do-not-steal defense. But I do feel like when I see people downloading music illegally, I get the same kind of feeling in my stomach or my psyche or whatever it is that happens if I see somebody stealing.
Katie still doesn't have to look very far to see someone downloading music without paying for it: her husband, Al.
Al: Well the equation for me at this point is I have more time than money.
Al has accumulated thousands of MP3s over the years -- from hip-hop to obscure surf rock from the 1950s. He thinks record labels ripped consumers off for decades. So he doesn't feel a lot of remorse about their current woes.
Al: The reason THAT we have this predicament, right, is because information is sort of naturally fighting to be free. It's naturally trying to escape the gatekeepers.
Katie: Maybe that's why you don't have that feeling of guilt that I have. Because that's underlying your sort of logic?
Al: Yeah, that's good, that's good, Dr. Freud.
Neither Al nor Katie seems all that worried about the legal consequences. Of course, they don't want us to use their last names, because they know the recording industry spent years suing people for illegal downloading. But in the end, those lawsuits haven't done much to alter their behavior.
Al: I think it's about the same as being afraid of being struck by lightning. You weigh the risks, and you move forward, I guess.
Jean-Francois Ouellet: If you think that there's not much chance that you'll be caught, it's not necessarily a factor that will make someone change their behavior.
Jean-Francois Ouellet teaches marketing at HEC Montreal. He says there are some consumers who always pay for music, and others who never pay. And in between, there are lots of listeners who decide on a case-by-case basis.
Ouellet: It's all about how people feel about the artist. People will download for free whatever music comes from the big-ticket artists, such as U2 or Madonna, for example. But when it comes to local artists, usually they'll say that those people are worth encouraging.
But the whole notion of collecting MP3 files on your computer or iPod may soon go the way of the 8-track. That's because streaming services like Rhapsody and Pandora are gaining in popularity. These are companies that store millions of songs on their hard drives. Listeners can access them online through their computers and mobile phones.
Eliot Van Buskirk: If that can convince people to pay a certain number of dollars per month for a service like that that stores everything in the proverbial cloud, the industry would actually make a lot more money.
Eliot Van Buskirk blogs about the music business at Wired.com. He says consumers have shown they want access to lots of music, even on their mobile devices. And some may be willing to pay a monthly fee for it.
Van Buskirk: Both purchasing and stealing music will become seen as a waste of disc space in the best-case scenario for the industry.
Streaming may work for some consumers. My friend Katie says she would think about it. But Al, not so much. He's wants to be sure he can play his songs wherever and whenever he wants.
Al: I like having a copy and being able to use it in whatever way I want. I want it for myself.
He just doesn't want to, you know, pay for it.
In Philadelphia, I'm Joel Rose for Marketplace Money.
I think what we are seeing here is the market trying to say something to the record industry. Al and Katie might be a bit polarized but I suspect many people fall in the middle. If they can't reasonably get something through legitimate channels, there is now another easy option. That sound you hear is the market yelling back to the record industry.
Of all things in the world to come rushing to the record industry's aid was a computer company. A computer company! Apple created the iTunes store and dragged the record industry kicking and screaming to the money tree. So now the equation for the consumer is "songs named properly with album artwork all in one convenient place for a price" versus the "anything goes but it is free" nature of the illegitimate channel. There will always be people that download for free but I would argue that the iTunes Store has proved that most people will pay when presented with a legitimate and attractive option.
It is unfortunate that creatives are getting crushed in all of this. Clearly CD pressing plants and dedicated record stores no longer have a place in the new model but creatives are central. Until the entire record industry gives customers exactly what they want for a reasonable price, they will continue to cede control to the unlikely new arbiters of "cool", the computer companies.
Feel free to replace "record industry" with "movie industry".
As a working musician, I work hard hours, playing, practicing, writing and traveling to gigs that are not huge money makers. I am a working musician, and some of my income comes from the royalties I receive from my recorded work. I want to applaud Bee Smith for her comments about the making of music being labor. I've been hearing this "sticking it to the man" argument for stealing music from people like Al for years. Al, you are stealing from us, not "Them". We have enough trouble with "Them" screwing us, let alone you. How about this Al, whatever you do for a living, why don't you give that away for free one day a week. Knock 52 days off your paycheck. I'm sure their are plenty of people with more "time than money" who would love to have whatever service you provide, with your labor, for free.
Walker T Ryan
The situation is so much more complicated than this article cares to admit. It's not simply about stealing -- it's about an industry being so entrenched in its old way of doing things and so afraid of change that it prefers to vilify a medium which people are more than happy to pay actual cash money for (as was later proven by numerous companies, notably Apple). You just need to provide that product in a way that is *more* convenient than the "theft" method, and provide it at a fair price. There's little chance in getting caught if you take candy from a baby, but few people do it, because it's just as easy, if not easier, to just walk into the store and pay the damn $0.25 for that lollipop fair and square. This is becoming more and more true every day for digital media, but we're still "not there yet" when I can immediately get last night's episode of Justified from a sketchy source (without commercials), but I have to wait a whole week for FX to finally put it on their web site -- with commercials which I am more than happy to watch.
