‘Try Before You Buy’ Undermines Defense of Unauthorized P2P
Thursday, January 24th, 2008 by Patrick RossThat not-so-nascent digital media market continues to grow.
CBS Pres.-CEO Les Moonves announced yesterday that its Last.fm service (acquired last year) will now offer on-demand free streaming from the complete libraries of the four major record labels as well as about 150,000 other labels and bands. Not only that, you get three full plays of any song or album to "try before you buy," and those trial songs can go into your own personalized radio stream at no cost.
As the market progresses and new, licensed business models are rolled out, it becomes increasingly difficult for defenders of unauthorized peer-to-peer services. You still hear a few tired old arguments, however, and there was one I heard yet again at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas — unauthorized P2P downloads drive music sales because they allow "consumers" to try out music and then buy what they like. Beyond the obvious question — "Why go out and buy something that's already on your computer that you didn't have to pay for?" — the new question has to be "Why not go listen to the music on Last.fm first?" Of course, in the motion picture space ad-supported opportunities to preview movies are exploding, so there's certainly no justification in the "try before you buy" unauthorized P2P argument there either.
The article notes that Last.fm competitor Imeem is also working on this model. Market competition is good, although I'm loathe to bet money against Les Moonves. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how the artists, songwriters, labels and distributors are going to make a sufficient amount of money on this, but the beautiful thing about a market is that I don't have to worry about that. They can work it out. What's important is that the service is licensed, thus artists will share in any profits that result.
