Everyone knows that there are a lot of ignorant people in the movie/music industry. It has for a long time annoyed me and most other customer of the movie/music industry that the industry’s only response to piracy is legal prosecution of downloaders instead of actually providing the digital global, DRM-free, and platform independent services we want. Actually improving their business model and listening to their customers seem to be alien ideas to the business.
I knew they didn’t care but I was really surprised when I read this. Even Sanvold Roland complained in his blog that he could not by the pre-order the new Dave Matthews Band record through iTunes. The response he got from Warner Music‘s Terje Pedersen (on myspace) through Twitter was rather incredible: “I think you should steal it and brag about the process on your brat blog afterwards. Don’t want you to be angry.” (translated from Norwegian)
First, he incouraged him to steal the music and second he insulted him. What kind of customer relation is that? Even though Terje Pedersen apologized a bit later it illustrates how much (some) people in the music/movie industry actually care about what we, their customers want. The music/movie industry has climed up too high and totally lost touch with its customers the last ten years (Napster anyone?), now they are taking the fall for not opening their eyes.
Edit: I found another English article on the topic. You should digg it to spreat the word.
Yeah, I pretty much stopped buying music. The whole systems sucks. Until they come up with something better, then I’m gonna continue listening to the old albums I already have.
There are a few solutions for digital distribution of music, even without DRM. Spotify is quite nice too. However, I am quite amazed that the movie and music industry have not done anything more to satisfy their customers requests. As far as I know they have more services in the USA than what we have here in Europe but I really don’t understand why we should be left with nothing. It would have been really great to for instance download or stream movies legally with the Xbox, a PC, or simply just the TV.