February 4, 2004
Expectations of a Closed Environment
One commenter questioned my statement: “How will people become accustomed to a digital world in which you have to rebuy all of your software players and music catalog whenever a better format, player, or service comes out?” Yes, people have had to shift formats over time, but I think there are three countervailing factors at work here
1. First, the old barriers don’t apply in the same way now. Bits are bits. You can’t upgrade a tape player to play CDs. You can (theoretically) upgrade the firmware on your MP3/CD player to also play AAC. You can’t turn your tape into a CD. You can (theoretically) convert your MP3 into AAC to play it on a compatible player.
2. That said, I think people will only tolerate circumstances in which they actually get an improved sound quality, like moving from tape to CD. Sure, if a new codec came around that sounded a lot better than MP3, people might rebuy their entire catalog. But, unlike in the analog world, they wouldn’t necessarily have to do so to make use of a new player – they wouldn’t have to have one player for MP3 and one for New-Codec – they wouldn’t have to choose between Beta and VHS.
3. Given that people are used to a world in which MP3 is ubiquitous, there is little reason for them to shift laterally to a codec linked to a proprietary DRM format. I don’t see people becoming accustomed to the walls between iTunes, Real, and WMA-based services and players.
Filed by Derek Slater at 12:21 am under General news
2 Comments
Maybe record companies will start selling licenses to songs which are not tied to a particular physical set of bits. This would allow for a replacement if your old copy were lost due to computer crashes and such. And it could be written to cover new releases of that particular recording, if some new format became popular. You might ask, why would a record company do this, giving up the revenues that they could gain by charging for these future replacements and upgrades? The answer would be that the record company could charge more for such a license. How much more? Well, put on your customer hat and think about how much you would pay for content which had this property. People tend to be risk-averse, so they will in general be willing to pay more for this protection than it is likely to cost the record companies.
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