most sensible thing I've heard in ages...

[rodneyorpheus]

At last my thoughts on the digital copying issue have finally been crystallised in this statement from Cory Doctorow, in the foreword to Little Brother:
...here's my pitch on why giving away ebooks makes sense at this time and place:
Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that

Comments

[vret]

That's one very good way of looking at it, but there is a bit more to it, on both sides.

When I used to write shareware I always made it fully functional with only a slightly annoying nag screen at start up or shut down. My attitude was that people who pay for shareware would pay for it (they were the market), and people who don't were just not going to pay whatever, so they weren't part of the market. Doing more than putting in just a mild reminder that it wasn't free software wouldn't have increased my sales, and may have decreased them. So in that sense I agree with Cory that the important thing is to get as much exposure as possible, rather than try to get as much as possible out of a small number of people. But I think that may only apply up to a limit where you have exposure to a certain proportion of the potential market.

I think a problem may arise at some obscurity limit. Apparently this may have happened to the Swedish prog band, The Flower Kings. After working their arses off for many years, with slowly increasing sales into a niche market, they seem to have hit a limit on sales at about the point downloads of their music on file sharing systems went from a trickle to a deluge. In other words, they have hit the mass market and the mass market is taking their music and not paying for it.

What isn't clear, and there's no way they can afford to do the research to find out, is whether these people are taking it without paying because they are curious but would never be interested enough to buy it (in which case Cory is still right), or because they just refuse to pay, perhaps because they have the surprisingly common attitude that all musicians are greedy bastards who are rolling in money.

But what The Flower Kings are seeing is that they appear to be a suddenly far more popular band who are never going to be able make a good living no matter how much more popular they appear to become, which is rather demoralising, to say the least.

I can't quite decide how well that fits with Tim O'Reilly's situation. He sells into quite a small market (in terms of the number of people who buy books) but does well in it because of his reputation for very high quality (which is rather like the position The Flower Kings were in until recently). His books are really of no interest to people outside that niche, but I doubt he would be happy if people were scanning them and uploading them onto the web for distribution for free, even though you could argue it wouldn't reduce his sales much.

[lee_chaos]

In the example of the Flower Kings, this is only really an issue if they can't shift gear from making music in studios to playing music live - that's how you take a big fanbase and make money from it these days - and it could be argued that this is a return to where music was before the invention of the Edison Cylinder.

It's actually true of my record label and its decline - none of my artists would take time off their well-paid IT jobs to go out and gig, so the money we made from album sales in the 90's declined (downloading is just one reason; the strong £ and refusal to join the Euro probably hit us as hard if not moreso) and our artists got fat and jaded infront of their computers, wondering where the good times went.

Popular bands can make money; popular bands can no longer make money the way they used to.