What do you think lies ahead for the music industry?I've been thinking that in this age of widespread reproduction technology, the price of media products may be significantly related to the retail price of blank storage media. For example, bookstores continue to sell books even though most people have easy access to Xerox machines, and Blockbusters continues to rent videos even though most people can easily copy the videos, largely because (I'd argue) the actual cost of the paper and toner to put in the Xerox machine is easily comparable to the cost of the book, assuming I'm buying in retail volumes. Similarly, while I could visit a friend with an extensive video library and copy all of his tapes, the cost of a blank tape at the supermarket is about as much as the cost of a rental at Blockbuster. It makes small-scale piracy a much less attractive proposition for me. (Large-scale piracy is a different question, but large-scale pirates can be effectively pursued by law enforcement.) On the other hand, why is Napsteresque music piracy so popular? Partly, I think, because music CDs cost a lot more than blank CDs. Perhaps what will happen in the end is that the price of music CDs will fall until at the retail level they are not greatly more expensive than blank CDs---just as a novel is not greatly more expensive than a notebook with blank pages in it. |