Quote:
Originally Posted by Lanik42
That is certainly one view of what P2P is about. And alternate view might be that P2P is a natural (if not wholly legal) reaction to artificial and profit driven barriers to acquiring music that people like. There are a couple factors here -
First, who wants to buy a whole CD when they only want one song? If they were able to purchase it individually, it would save them money and the industry would still get its cut. The music industry failed to adequately meet the desires of the consumer.
That leads to the second point - if the music industry had jumped on the concept of digital music sales when it was still young, people wouldn't be in the habit of downloading music via P2P, which I think is as big a driving force as laziness/greed when it comes to downloading music. Once the foundation was in place, it became self-perpetuating.
Even now, they like to stick to methods that don't really work for them, or for the artist - namely DRM.
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But rather than purchase an entire CD, you can and have the ability to download individual tracks - for quite some time now.
I’m not going to defend the music industry, but I’m willing to forgive them for not having a working web-based business model in place given the near overnight (in business terms and time) explosion of filesharing websites and services.
Human nature is such that, if given a choice between paying for something, or getting it for free, especially when the negative consequences of doing so are hidden, the majority of times, we prefer free. But that, of course, does not make it right.