I am so tired of hearing about piracy, and evil people not buying music anymore, when the very people crying about it, are the ones that have slept on it for ten years.

So what should they do?
In short: They should begin rewarding those that DO buy the music instead of focusing on punishing those that DON’T buy the music.

Allow me to offer a couple of examples that I am convinced will help.

Forget about DRM and copy protection.
First off – these things do not work anyways. By now it should be evident that all forms of copy protection fails.

Secondly it does restrict the usage of the music for the users that actually went and bought it. So you in essence end up punishing the ones that bought your product. And that is a bad strategy.

I have personally experienced purchasing an album legally, and ending up having to download an illegal copy of it in order to listen to it – because DRM restrictions made it impossible to listen to my legal version. That is a bad user experience and do not offer me a reason to buy an album. On the contrary. When getting an album is better, more convenient and offers me more options if I get it illegally, why should i go through all the hassle just to be allowed to pay for it?

Forget old ways of distribution and embrace the new ones
Since Napster made the sharing of music files a common thing to do, the recording industry have been trying to stop file sharing. But after ten years of hunting pirates, coming up with copy protection and new laws and restrictions on use of creative work, file sharing have never been bigger than now.

It is no longer just music files that are being shared. People will now without hesitation download DVD-rips and games weighing in at four, five – even 7 gigabytes. Unthinkable in 1998 but here we are. Almost everything is available.

And this is in my belief the number one reason why the recording industry (and film industry as well) have failed. They do not understand what is going on. I am convinced that file sharing is so popular because it is convenient. It is available. It is easy.
Yes I know that many people will argue that it is because it is free and you can steal movies without paying. I will admit that “free” always make a good selling point, but I honestly do not think that is the main reason why people download.
A fact supporting this is, that even if music is given away like Radiohead did, the amount of downloads through torrents was the same as for an ordinary album. Meaning that convenience and not price is what decide where to get stuff.

When you want a song and you look at the options:

1. Go to a record store and get a piece of plastic (a cd) that you only use once when you import it into your playlist.
2. Go to an online music store and buy a file that is DRM protected so you can’t use it where you want to.
3. Download it online in 5 minutes and have a file that works on all platforms and in all music players.

Then I don’t find it particularly odd that people often choose the latter.

And this is the problem down to the bone. The people selling music still see all online music as a flawed, bad for business competition to their cd sales. But a cd is not the holy grail. A cd is merely a media for transporting music. Just like a cassette tape is. And just like we moved on from cassette tapes we have now moved on to the next media for distribution of music. The internet.

Carrot instead of whip
Of course people making music should be paid for their work. No discussion.

So instead of trying to get people to buy CD’s that they don’t want, the industry should start looking at ways of making it worth you money to actually buy songs online.

Rewarding people that buy your product is a much better strategy than trying to punish all those that don’t buy it.

Imagine if you bought an album on iTunes for example. Pay 8$ for it and get the whole album with no DRM or restrictions. But what you also get is access to an area where you (because you bought the album and therefore we like you and want to pamper you) can get extra stuff related to the album you paid for.

There is virtually no limit to what could be put in that area but just to give a few examples:

Added value stuff:

• View all music videos from that album (or artist).
• Some behind the scenes footage from a concert.
• An exclusive interview with the artist that only people that bought the album can see.
• Artist related shows (like MTV cribs, the making of the video, the life/career of the artist)
• Membership of the fan club and access to fan gear (at a reduced price perhaps)
• Discount on earlier albums from this artist.

VIP type stuff:

• Access to artist blog, vlog or diary
• Buy tickets to artist concerts before they are on sale to the public
• See new music videos before everyone else
• Purchase the next album from this artist before it is released to the public
• Get free remixes, instrumentals and other special versions of songs from the album.

Community type stuff:

• Chat or forum where you can talk with other people that also bought the album
• Access to artist related competitions (who knows the most about this artist)
• Get ringtones, wallpapers, screensavers, buddy icons

As i said before the possibilites are endless, but if I got access to just half of the items listed above, then I would feel that the 8$ i spent on an album was really a good investment. I would return on a regular basis to check new developments on “my” artists, and I wouldn’t want to give my password to people on a torrent, so everyone interested in these services would buy the album.

That is a thing that DRM will never accomplish