Bijan Sabet

Music Piracy

I’m currently on a plane flying from Boston to SF and catching up on various blogs and tweets.

Fred wrote a most interesting post, Anatomy of a Pirate, today where he describes the craziness of not being able to buy music legally. Go read the entire post but heres the punchline:

I don’t know whose idea this is of the way to market a record but I’m hoping they read this and never do this to a fan again. Fans love music. They want to support the musicians and they want to pay for music. But if you put enough hurdles in front of them, they will become pirates. As I did this morning.

First of all kudos to Fred for being this forthcoming about this publicly. I don’t know many that have that level of conviction and honesty. It’s one of my favorite things about Fred. He calls a spade a spade.

When it comes to music or TV or movie content, I hit that same wall of frustration all the time. Sometimes I wait and sometimes I don’t and I end up grabbing it from bit torrent. Just the other day I wanted to download Home but as you can see from the link, the mp3 aren’t for sale. I can only buy the CD. I ended up ordering the CD but as fred says, thats fucked up.

The same thing is true for video. I pay HBO every month but I can’t watch HBO on my iPad or stream episodes from the web. I would gladly pay for that but there isn’t any one to cash my check.

Sean Parker makes the critical point that the music (and content) industry must accept - namely the war on music piracy is a failure. Roughly 4-10 trillion songs have been downloaded illegally vs about 4 billion legally.

That a clear signal that content owners need to make it easier and better to buy music.

The current way isn’t working.