Betalogue

Can’t believe that I missed this “manifesto” when it first came out.

“Embrace file-sharing, or die“

It could be argued that MP3s are the greatest marketing tool ever to come along for the music industry. If your music is not being downloaded, then you’re in trouble. If you can’t give it away, you certainly can’t sell it. Daniel Bedingfield recently had a top 3 song on the radio, with “Gotta Get Thru This.” However, his music was hardly available through any of the P2P networks. His record lasted on the Billboard Top 200 for less than a month, even though the single had been on radio playlists all over the country for several months. It’s also been widely reported that the most downloaded album of all time was “The Eminem Show,” by Eminem. It was downloaded so heavily that Interscope took the unusual step of releasing the album a week early due to the rampant online sharing of tracks from the album. Fast-forward to the end of 2002, and “The Eminem Show” is the best-selling album of the year. This seems to indicate the opposite of what the RIAA would have you believe. When people share MP3s, more music is sold, not less.

I couldn’t agree more, and have already had the opportunity to share similar thoughts.

Of course, it’s slightly ironic that this manifesto was published by Salon, i.e. a web site that is currently struggling to avoid its own demise by forcing non-paying readers to download their way through pages of advertising before they can reach the full text of the articles that they are trying to read.

Methinks it’s a case of “Embrace full access to your articles, or die”.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Tuesday, March 11th, 2003 at 12:00 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.