DRM

Stealing is better than free, if free sucks

With rampant music downloading at colleges/universities, someone thought up the brilliant idea of creating a free music download services for college student. The catch? The music expires once you stop being a college student. The WSJ says students don't think much of the idea:

The reason: While Cornell's online music program, through Napster, gave him and other students free, legal downloads, the email introducing the service explained that students could keep their songs only until they graduated. "After I read that, I decided I didn't want to even try it," says Mr. Petrigh, who will be a senior in the fall at the Ithaca, N.Y., school.

College students don't turn down much that's free. But when it comes to online music, even free hasn't been enough to persuade many students to use such digital download services as Napster, Rhapsody, Ruckus and Cdigix. As a result, some schools have dropped their services, and others are considering doing so or have switched to other providers.

Of course this was all predictable, given what we've learned (or not!) from crappy services like Pressplay. I find it amazing that people can still blindly forge ahead creating these crappy services, sinking tons of cash into these projects -- only to have the plug pulled on the project months later.

Back in the late 90's the saying in response to Napster was: "You can't compete with free!". Now we can see that "Free cripple music can't compete with free file-sharing downloads."

What's even more interesting about this is that the user experience for file-sharing apps is pretty poor -- it can be a pain to download less popular things, the media quality leaves a lot to be desired, etc. Any legal solution is almost certain to have a better user experience than file-sharing services. Yet, college students are leaving these services and favoring the solutions with the bumpy user experience. That is very clear feedback about what music lovers are doing to get their music fix. Why does the music industry always insist of always doing the opposite of what your customers want? If they didn't have the incumbent cartel and there was actual competition, the labels would've filed for chapter 11 a looong time ago.

Technorati Tags: drm, file-sharing, university

Posted by Mayhem at July 9, 2006 05:26 PM