expertSEM

Congress is getting close to some very tough measures to combat illegal file sharing on college campuses. While outside the general purview of the PPC Handy Man, as a beta user of Napster in 1998, I feel I’ve grown up with this issue, and seen it spiral madly out of control. What could be a huge profit center for the record industry is a constant source of consternation and fear. It need not be.

In my mind, it all boils down very simply based on the precedent of the business model for radio. Radio is an ad supported medium. A 3rd party person (the DJ) selects music to play in order to attract a certain demographic to the station who will then hear the ads and go to buy the services.

Could we not structure the exact same thing with a change in roles for online music?

Imagine instead that all published music was freely downloadable, and that the stipulation was that while a user is online, the record companies get to distribute whatever ads they see fit to at a reasonable rate for that service. The user then becomes the DJ with access to whatever songs they prefer, and instead of an outright purchase model, the medium is instead supported by ads of one sort or another.

Additionally, consider how much hard drive space is taken up in saving what amounts to duplicate copies of pop songs. My guess is that many trillions of megabytes are used up as music storage. Consolidating to an online storage model, even one run by the RIAA would probably take mere terrabytes, and a secure access system that allowed users to pull anything they want depending on the number of ads they agree to accept (or if they pay for access) would free up an amazing amount of aggregate data storage.

Either way, getting creative with an ad supported vehicle will acknowledge the reality of how people behave. This will then unleash the creativity of the advertising world (of which I am a part) thus delivering incredibly relevant ads which benefit both user and licensee.

Pandora is out of the box on this one, the record companies will never stop transfer of royalty free music, this battle goes back to tape cassette bootlegging. Instead they need to accept reality and make the most out of it.