The 21st Century has introduced new ways for consumers to consume products, from listening to music, right through to reading books and magazines. It should be a golden age, but all too often with each great leap forward in technology, the rights of the consumer seem to take a bit of a leap backwards.
Wasn’t Radio Better?
Spotify has cut the number of times it’s free listeners can listen to a single song – to just five times. That’s right, your favourite song may be played on the radio umpteen times a day, but on Spotify you have five plays – EVER. After that you either pay for a premium account – or turn on the radio.
Far from being the new way to listen to music, your own personalised radio station playing the tracks that you like and allowing easier purchase of your favourite tracks, Spotify is fast becoming like every other 21st Century game changing idea, hobbled by the very people it could have saved. Ironically, these are the same people complaining that when customers are offered the choice of paying and getting less than they used to, or not paying, that some customers are not paying.
The music industry, long criticised for dragging its feet in the digital age, has begun to catch up of late. Removing DRM from digital music, which had meant that songs were effectively rented, rather than purchased, and allowing many more music download services. Spotify, and other streaming services were seen as a breath of fresh air, competition for illegal downloads and a more modern, personalised radio, that allowed users to avoid the 15 Rihanna songs played daily on the radio, and listen to their own choice of music. Surely the way forward?
Not so for the music companies, who see it as giving away music for free, which oddly is not how they see standard radio. New music takes a while to appear on Spotify after release sometimes a month or two, again not like radio which plays songs before release, and some music doesn’t appear at all. No, the music industry doesn’t like streaming services at all.
BBC News – Warner retreats from free music streaming
Warner chief executive Edgar Bronfman Jr said: “Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed.
“The ‘get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price’ strategy is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future.”
Bizarrely, rather than champion the 21st Century model of a personalised radio station and the positives it could bring to the industry, such as the captive audience, the reams of listening and purchasing data, the music companies seem to go out of their way to destroy it. In an age where anyone with a computer can get their music for free, it does seem self destructive.
Money For Old Rope
The publishing industry also seems intent on following this path to destruction. Rather than viewing the e-reader or the tablet PC as heralding in a new age of reading, and a rejuvanation of the publishing industry not seen since the launch of Amazon, the publishers seem to view them with suspicion; or worse, like the movie industry before them with DVD and Blu-Ray, a way of taking the consumer for even more money.
Not only do e-books cost the same as printed, cover illustrated, truck delivered and warehouse stored, paper books (and sometimes even more), they also come with more restrictions, and less rights (they cannot be lent out, or sold on), they are effectively rented and are able to be taken back at any time, as Amazon demonstrated with the infamous 1984 debacle.
Not surprisingly the publishing industry, like the music and movie industry before it, are seeing a sharp rise in pirated products.