In the late 70s and early 80s, I was a teenager and a great fan of the rock group, KISS. This was a time in my life when music was very important to me and I spent a great deal of money on records and much time listening to them.
Since KISS was very popular back then, a lot of my friends also bought their records.
Cassette recorders were pretty common so we could have copied the records for each other rather than buy them. After all, most of us did not have much spare cash and that would have been the cheapest way to own all of their records.
Despite having the opportunity to copy, I never did so.
One of the reasons was that the experience of owning a KISS record was a treat in and of itself. It wasn't the quality of vinyl sound as compared to the hiss-filled messiness of a cassette; It was the record itself and how it was packaged.
If KISS knew one thing, they knew the prize in the Cracker Jack box was often more appealing than the candy itself.
For several albums, starting with Alive!, KISS included special goodies with each record. Booklets, stickers, rub-on tattoos, certificates, paper masks, and posters were among these items.
When you're young, such things are not only just plain neat but also ways of attaching your identity to something seemingly greater than yourself. Displaying such items was a proclamation of the type of person you were through association with the bands to which you listened.
It also didn't hurt that the albums were large and had creative and artistic covers.
They were interesting to look at and beautiful to display. Albums had size, heft, and a tactile sense, something CDs mdash; lightweight, small, and slick mdash; lack.
It's not my intent to pine for the days of vinyl but to point out the appeal of packaging.
KISS knew how to make you want to buy an album. A copy couldn't compare to the physical experience and delight of actually owning one of their records.
The satisfaction I used to feel with buying and owning a record is not something that made the transition to the change in format from vinyl to CD.
The tiny little covers are too small to regard as art and, and to be honest, a lot of them are banal digital images which are more about smooth marketing than art. Additionally, the discs are insubstantial and disappear into the player, removing the user from connecting the content to the physical media.
At present, the music industry likely suffers more from casual piracy than the film industry or software developers.
The most common reasons given to explain why music is pirated are because CDs are overpriced and music files are relatively small and easy to share compared to video or software. However, a possible reason that is constantly ignored is the fact that music CDs represent very little advantage over pirated files when it comes to the user experience.
The recording industry today might want to take a hint from my experience.
Rather than waste their time tracking down and suing people who copy music, they might want to consider investing their money in hiring creative teams to come up with ideas to make owning physical media full of music superior to a digital copy of the music files.
I'm no longer in the target demographic for music consumption nor am I a marketing specialist, but somewhere out there in the multitude of options one can give a consumer, there has to be something (or a combination of a variety of things) appealing enough to push people to belly up to the music store counter and buy a disc.
DVD makers have already gotten this (at least) partially right.
Additional content is part of what drives people to run out and buy their favorite T.V. shows on DVD rather than record them or wait for them to be shown in syndication.
Of course, there is also the fact that most DVDs are priced reasonably for the quantity of content they offer.
Content creators are never going to beat piracy because it is human nature to cater to one's self-interest above and beyond serving higher moral urges. People know it's wrong to steal but they do it anyway.
This is pervasive across all cultures and a variety of situations. It's illogical and ultimately fruitless to focus on punishment as a means of combating this problem. All it will serve to do is drive the technology that assists piracy further ahead.
The more the RIAA sues sites which facilitate file sharing, those who write software for it, and those who share the files, the more file sharing software will get better at hiding its users.
Rather than engage in pointless prosecution that ultimately alienates present and future customers, content creators should focus on a more positive and hopefully lucrative path. They need to offer the customers something more enticing than getting music for free.
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