Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
The thing that you are both missing is that a majority of people listened to music on the radio, so people were use to the idea that music was free. Also back then, there were a lot of used record stores, much like there were a lot of used book stores. With cassettes, people got in the habit of making copies of albums and then giving copies to their friends. So people got us to the idea of passing copies around. Napster simply tapped into that culture.
I would tend to argue that piracy tends to be more of a cultural thing than a price thing. Price points do matter from the stand point of sales, but you can't beat free from a price point of view. If price was the driving force, then why are there any sales at all?
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Price isn't the be all, end all. But it is clearly a factor. In the end it is price and convenience.
In the early days of digital music, the publishers tried to recreate the existing model and it sucked. Napster didn't only succeed because it was free. It was also so much easier than getting music in any other way.
Nowadays, when I remember that other Alphaville song I want, I could probably scour the dark corners of the interwebs and risk a virus to get a free copy. But it's easier to go pay $1.29 at Amazon to get it. I wouldn't be as likely to pay $18.00 for a full album when there's only two songs I'm interested in. (Nowadays, the full album is $9.49. I'm talking about if we were still following the old model.)
Movies don't seem to understand this yet, that's why piracy is much more common there.
You could argue that book publishers figured it out and strangled the e-book market in the cradle rather than face the change.