Ah, memories...

Angela pegged me to a music promotion on Dose.ca where you can get 15 tracks from some pretty decent bands for the low low cost of free – not even an email opt-in required.

Back when Dose launched in 2005, it had one of the only online music stores in the country, which was kind of nifty as an add-on to the site and not a standalone store – if memory serves, Puretracks was the largest, with iTunes having just opened their Canadian store the past December.  I worked (for a vendor) on the Dose music store, which, like PureTracks at the time, used Microsoft DRM but apparently the purchase process was a little more seamless, or so I’d heard (in the crush of launch, I don’t think I so much as sketched what the music store pages were going to look like, let alone sampled the competition – the site just evolved as a series of classic ASP scripts with some hand-coded (in Notepad, because I didn’t have a VS2003 license) ASP.NET 1.1 to make a few things easier.

Anyway, the Dose store did a few promotional giveaways in the summer of 2005 where you could get a free track each week in exchange for giving your email address to the sponsor (possibly SnapTax and then Virgin Mobile, but don’t quote me.)  It was a little cumbersome; I think you had to confirm your email to get a coupon which you could then use to get a free track in the store, but there weren’t any user accounts like in iTunes, so you still had to fill out some forms for the DRM to take hold.  This is all from memory.  I suspect the DRM servers are still running (it was a 3rd party service that seems to still have clients) so the recipients of those tracks have so far dodged the “Plays for Sure – until we stop it” mess that went down a few years back.

That was then.  Last night I clicked a link, then a button, and then entered my iTunes password, and 15 tracks started downloading, which are now fuelling my morning work session.  And I haven’t kept up on this stuff, but I believe they’re DRM-free.

5 years took us this far. Yes, it’s still very hard to “just start” a music store with major label approval, and things have consolidated to an even larger degree, but it’s progress just the same, and record labels are getting better at music promotions as well.  And hey, if I want to hear a particular song these days without actually downloading it, I can probably find it on YouTube – which also launched in early 2005.

Looking back like this helps every once in a while, both to get excited about what’s next and to remember that companies need to be constantly moving forward – the user experience of 5 years ago would get you laughed off the stage of any DemoCamp today, so what’s it going to be like 3, 6, or 18 months from now?

In lieu of something significant (has it been a month already? I swear, between blogging and bathing, I don’t know how anyone gets anything done,) I found the Google ads around the feed around this story about being sued by the RIAA somewhat amusing (bear in mind I’m in Canada):

No, these aren't clickable.

It’s been about a month since I read Appetite for Self Destruction, and I was almost feeling optimistic about the music industry, but something’s been holding me back from posting about it.  Probably the fact that they still make a business around suing their customers.  And how the music retailers (what’s left of them, anyway) think downloaders should be sued but then are shocked when they’re asked to pay fees for playing music in their music stores.

The fact of the matter is, there’s basically an infinite amount of music out there.  Check these poorly-researched stats: as of April 2007, Myspace had 25 million songs. Hosted. I have no idea how many of these were duplicates, but that was over two years ago, so cut me some slack and assume a lot more indie bands have uploaded their songs to the service since then.

This means that if I lived to be 100 and listened to Myspace tracks nonstop, I still wouldn’t hear them all.

Once there’s more than you can use in a lifetime, I reckon that’s infinite.

Sure, if we crowdsourced the problem, the population of Canada alone could listen to the whole inventory in about 3 minutes.

But we wouldn’t have any shared stories.

Music gains power when more people listen to it, and that’s the blessing and the curse for the industry: they don’t have the same issues of scarcity-based pricing that other companies have.  In a certain sense, the more people that listen to a track, the more valuable it becomes, while at the same time the cost of distribution stays relatively static on a per-listen basis.  The margin against this hypothetical value grows with every listen.

While some companies have experimented with the Dutch auction style of pricing, like how Amie Street prices songs progressively higher as they get more popular, encouraging early music discovery and adoption, you’ll have a hard time finding a consumer who’s willing to pay $1000 because they’re the 70th million person to “discover” a track.  Indeed, in today’s market, people who are late to the party usually get a discount on items that aren’t hot anymore.

I don’t know the legal term for the argument (it’s probably in Latin,) but people being sued by the RIAA need to figure out how to explain how while they might have 60,000 tracks on their hard drive, the number they would have downloaded if they were worth even a penny each (to the downloader) would be about 6.

In the meantime, I’m considering taking Google’s advice and downloading as much as I can before declaring bankruptcy. You know, as long as I can still enter the USA. I hear they have vegan doughnuts.

The eMarketer headline: Most Kids Download Music Legally

The press release for the actual study’s headline: Kids in the U.S. Continue to Download Music Illegally

Oh, and the press release’s sub-head: “Lack of parental supervision of “tweens” leads to lawsuits and potential dangers from malicious software on the Web – but peer-to-peer file sharing continues”

I’m guessing that eMarketer didn’t read the actual report either, but why bother looking for facts when you can just pick the spin that proves whatever point you’re trying to make?

Anyway, still worth noting, and while I’m not shelling out for the actual report, and the information might not be in there anyway depending on the survey, but it’d be interesting to know how much volume went through illegal channels versus places like iTunes – was iTunes just being used for the free download of the week and podcasts, or do kids have that iTunes “allowance” set up, or are they actually buying music regularly (presumably with mom or dad’s credit card just the same)?