Dramatic happenings this week, as the RIAA apparently succeeds in all but shutting down two of the major P2P networks – eDonkey and WinMX were inoperable yesterday, and reports claim that competitors BearShare and Grokster are in urgent negotiations to avoid being sued into the ground by the recording industry’s legal eagles.
“Is this the death of P2P?” cry the tabloids. Well, I can answer that: No. Hell no. Does this instead herald the accelerating popularity of headless, decentralised, virtually untraceable P2P? Why, yes.
Now I’m no economics major, but I do know a thing or two about markets. The P2P “market”, such as it is, is fucking huge. It includes almost every person I know under 40 who has any knowledge at all of the internet, and many people I know over 50, including my boss, in probably every country in the world. It is probably over a billion people. It is insatiable, borderless, and pretty much unstoppable.
So why on earth does the RIAA, or anyone else, think that by closing down a couple of the easier-to-use “newbie” services, they are going to do anything at all to stop the P2P avalanche? There is no stopping it. All it will do is push people into better, more decentralised, harder-to-shut-down services. The obvious answer might be Bittorrent, but even that is a bit hard to understand for new users, and relies on a certain level of knowledge to find what you’re looking for. In fact, Bittorrent, despite its apparent size to many of us, is actually mainly used by the top 5% – the rest is still the domain of kazaa, limewire, et al. Of course, us top 5% probably use more than 50% total of the gross P2P bandwidth consumption, but it was ever thus.
So where are the teeming hordes going to go? Gnutella, probably, or – more likely – new, more robust systems which have not yet gained mass popularity. Overnet is a contender, as is Freenet, which has traditionally suffered performance issues but is supposedly close to solving them. The point is, the users will just go further underground. Closing the existing services only forces people to find new ones, increase their skill, educate themselves. If one follows this to its logical conclusion, within a few years there will be an internet-wide encrypted, anonymous, decentralised file sharing supernetwork, impervious to record company intrusion and accessible to almost anyone. It will be around that stage that the record companies have really, irreversibly, lost.
What can the RIAA, and its sister organisations around the world, do to actually solve their problem? Well, the thing they should have done from day one was to strike an arrangement with Napster. It was the first, and in many ways the best – no P2P system since has had the pure depth and elegance of Napster. I said it at the time, and I’ll say it again – I would have paid for Napster, maybe $20 a month. When they closed it down, they didn’t just generate a tidal wave of perhaps irreversible illwill from every Napster user on earh, but they touched off the start of a worldwide P2P arms race which is only just entering its stride. They had that initial chance, and they blew it. They could maybe try again – come up with their own system, duplicating the orginal napster, and see if people will buy it .. it is probably too late. Everyone has made their own arrangements now.
So what can they do? Well, the obvious answer is to drop prices. I am sorry to say it, but I will not pay AUD$35 for a CD any more. Any CD. I would be reluctant to pay anything over $20, really. But under $20, I start to become interested, and around $12-15 I would probably buy quite a lot. Especially if the disks were not just old 44.1KHz CDs, but new DVDA recordings – I would be very interested in that. My purchasing now has dropped to perhaps 5 CDs a year; at greatly lower prices, it would be 50 or more. Hell, I want to buy CDs, I love owning them. I’m just not paying the current prices and I never will.
Secondly, the online stores. Again, they cost too much. The quality is insufficient. The DRM rules do not really bother me, but then again I don’t have much experience living with them; they might start to annoy me the first time I tried to send a file to a friend. But the big problem is the price. The only tracks I am interested in from the iTunes Store come from the japanese version – they are, of course, globe songs. They are 200Yen each. Forget it – just forget it. I’m just not paying that for three and a half megabytes of 128kbps sound data, no matter how easy it is.
I’d pay $20/month for unlimited download from iTunes. Maybe even $30/month. But that’s pretty much the only way I would ever be a user of such a service. Perhaps if the songs were higher quality I wouldn’t mind, but these prices, for low quality CD rips? Forget it!
The recording companies should not be trying to push people towards their services, they should be trying to pull them. Make the legal downloads higher quality than the mp3s I can download right now, for free. Make the prices reasonable, not more than the comparable plastic CD, which is already ludicrously overpriced. Drop the prices of CDs and introduce higher audio quality – we’ve been stuck at 16 bits for 21 years, for christ’s sake. Stop suing kids and trying to litigate to save a doomed business plan. Produce better music in the first place. Institute a concert ticket discount system for CDs. Add value. Just do something, god damn it, that’s different from what you’re doing now. Because if current trends continue, the chances of any record company on earth seeing the colour of millions like me all around the world’s money are already pretty low, and moving closer to zero every year this continues.
PS Same goes for cinemas, movies and DVDs.
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