Sunday, 20 January 2008

Music Downloads

The Internet is a great invention and has done a world of good in enabling human beings to communicate with each other. However, humans being, in the end, just humans, it turned out to be best at:

  1. Porn for all - and that means all
  2. Recreational Arguments
  3. Shopping

Recently it has become possible to transmit music at pretty high quality, and some unusually alert exec at EMI has realised, about five years late, that the "all" part and the "shopping" part add up to a rather good way of making money, at practically zero cost, out of their old recordings.

The prices are four times what they would be if they were serious about me unzipping my purse, and the licence seems bizarre to me (non-commercial use? What, no DJs? Why exclude your highest-spending, most determined customers?), but it's DRM-less, it's high-bitrate, and it's there. Have a look at what they've got for Carlos di Sarli and Alfredo de Angelis.

Now, let's see. Is anyone going to compete? I might buy one album at this price, if I weren't the sort of annoying person who reads licence terms and gets offended. At a quarter of the price, I might well buy more than four albums and a bunch of odd tracks, and they would make more money at a marginal cost of practically £0.00. Why?

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