A Copyfighter’s Musings

See here. (slightly edited from original).

It recaps a lot of the points in these posts:

The Copyfight: Back to School Edition
Spin Machine: Penn State’s Download Service
More Crummy Reporting on Penn State’s Music Service
The Price is wrong (pt 2)

Filed by Derek Slater at 9:55 am under General news
Comments Off on My letter to Pho on PSU/Napster

Earlier, I thought about how people’s willingness to use more than one app for music downloading might hurt paying service’s chances.

Let’s play out a similar idea with Napster’s service.  Students start to use the service. First, they realize that some of the music they want isn’t on it, which already gives them some incentive to go to KaZaA.  Second, they realize that they have to pay 99 cents to actually own a DRMed version that they can burn to a CD or move to a portable device.  That will likely reduce the value of the tethered downloads to a significant extent, particularly when the students consider taking their music collection with them for winter/spring/summer break.

So, for most songs, they jump right back onto KaZaA.  And once they’re doing that frequently, what need do they have to use Napster 2.0’s streams?  Why would they use it at all?

Like last time, feel free to challenge my underlying assumptions.

Filed by Derek Slater at 9:39 am under General news
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