iCompetition

Surprise, surprise RIAA. Despite your campaign to hunt down the downloaders (with tacit approval from the Big Four), about 1 billion illegal songs are still traded every month. Suing grandmothers and 12-year-olds may be a scare tactic, but it's clearly not an effective one. Since the iTunes Store was launched in 2003, more than 2 billion songs have been sold through its 99-cents-per-song model. However, compared to a potential 44 billion songs illegally traded through P2P software - such as Gnutella, BitTorrent, Kazaa, the old Napster - the iTunes Store seems like small change.

The threat of a lawsuit doesn't seem to faze the small army of illegal downloaders. So instead of laying the heavy hand of the law upon them, why don't we encourage them to behave otherwise? How can we make the concept of legal purchase more palatable to a mass audience?

Convenience! Steve Jobs has already come out in opposition to digital rights management in his open letter to the Big Four last week. His iPhone concept is tying into the idea of convenience. Consumers can download any track from the iTunes Store, anytime, anywhere with a click of the touchscreen. A company in Europe and Asia actually beat Jobs to the punch with their MusicStation concept.


Omnifone is a company that operates in Europe, Asia and South Africa, and their MusicStation is quite a slick program. It works on almost any music phone, 2.5-3G, and allows you to download any digital track in their system for a weekly flat rate of £1.99 or €2.99 (slightly less than $4 US). Unlimited downloads for $4 a week? I'll take it! Downloaded directly to my phone, with PC compatibility? Even better! However, there is one pitfall. Just like the iTunes Store, the MusicStation digital tracks are encoded with DRM.

The current use of DRM by the record companies is not encouraging consumers to walk on the good side of the law. Why pay for something that you cannot use freely, while you can download a DRM-free track for nothing and be able to do whatever you want with it.

When will the record companies let go of their chokehold on digital music? If they want to survive, they need to change.