Is the Music Piracy War over?
So, the UK Top 40 is probably going to start including listens using streaming services like Last.fm, Napster, iMeem and We7, meaning that streaming services are starting to account for a significant proportion of UK music consumption.
And the record labels have finally reached a decent compromise deal with the online radio services such as Pandora and Spotify, meaning that Pandora should finally become available again outside the US, but more than that means that the labels are effectively legitimising the model.
And Pirate Bay have been bought out and are going legit, which means that they too can see which way the wind’s blowing and realise they need to make p2p consumer-friendly.
And truly disruptive 21st century business models like slicethepie and soundcloud seem to be doing ok too and they also don’t rely on physical file downloads.
I don’t know about you, but to me it all smells a bit like the music piracy war is effectively over and the only questions that remain are who can bring truly ubiquitous streaming (i.e. home, remote and in-car) with a proper user interface that allows you to both search huge catalogues of tracks as well as manage your relationship to a subset of those tracks - i.e. your ‘collection’. Whoever manages that will likely win out pretty much whatever their business model is, in my opinion.
So, could it be that the record industry has finally realised one of the tenets of the smart growth manifesto, namely that had they succeeded in stopping piracy, they would have priced the next generation of artists out of being music literate enough to sustain the industry by forcing them to actually buy huge back-catalogues of music?
Maybe.
The acid test will be whether they drop the multi-million dollar damages they’ve hounded Jammie Thomas for since 2007…
