DO YOU DOWNLOAD MUSIC?

Do you or have you ever downloaded copyrighted songs for free from the Internet? If you answered "yes," then as far as the recording industry is concerned, you are a thief. Downloading copyrighted music to be played on your computer or burned to a CD without paying for the music is stealing. So why are there so many fine upstanding individuals ripping the music industry off? One reason seems to be that it's easy to do so as the proliferation of free music download sites continue to appear. The other most quoted reason is that fans are disgruntled over the fact that they must purchase an entire album to obtain the one or two hit songs they want to hear.

In the olden days when 45 records were king, fans could buy the individual hit songs they wanted to hear for a song. The flip side usually contained some throwaway selection but who cared? The song you wanted was available for a couple of bucks and if for some reason you wanted more, you could then buy the artist's more costly 33 LP album. In today's CD world, there is really nothing comparable to the 45. Yes there have been some attempts to produce physically smaller single hit CDs that still play in any CD player. But for whatever reason, they haven't proved to be a marketing success. So fans are forced to shell out the $20 or more to buy the full artist album.

And even when you do buy the albums, you are still left with dozens of CDs that have just the one or two songs you want to hear. So most music lovers copy the songs they want and burn them to their own CDs creating a single disk that contains only the songs they enjoy, in the order they want them to play. And with MP3 compression, you can store hundreds of songs on a single disk as opposed to the 13 or so titles you can fit on an ordinary CD

All of these technological advantages combined with the convenience of not having to go to a record store can overwhelm an individual's motivation to remain an honest consumer. And it seems to me that industry attempts at finding a solution to the problem via legislation and encryption technologies are not the answer. Blocking the electronic distribution of music is at best a Band-Aid and will not stem tide of fans making illegal copies. Trying to shame fans via TV commercials that feature recording artists asking viewers not to steal their songs are also doomed to failure. What is needed is a better marketing model.

There have been several successful test marketing schemes that seem to work. One of the most popular is having a distribution center that lets fans download their choice of music selections for 99 cents a song. Once a song is downloaded, the purchaser can save the song to the computer's hard drive, burn it to a CD or transfer it to an MP3 player. Working in cooperation with the recording artists and their labels, these test sites have worked so well that in many instances, the servers handling the service quickly became overloaded and had to be reset to only serve certain regional areas as a way of limiting the huge number of download demands.