A good discussion over at A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing by Joe Konrath.
The music and movie industries tried to fight piracy, and failed. As a result, companies not previously associated with music and movies have become rich by doing three things.
1. Understanding consumer need.
2. Giving the consumers what they want at a price consumers are willing to pay.
3. Making it as convenient as possible for consumers.As a result of this, the biggest music player maker and music seller is a computer company, and companies such as Tivo and Netflix, along with services like Direct TV and On Demand, are changing the way people watch movies.
Apple, and the companies that rent TV shows and movies through subscriptions, have discovered something interesting about the media habits of humans.
It used to be thought that we really valued the physical object the media was presented on. As consumers, it was important for us to own VHS and cassette tapes, DVDs and LPs, CDs and BluRay.
And yet, consumers have shown, in greater and greater numbers, that they don’t care about the delivery system, and they don’t care about ownership of a tangible product. They just want a cheap and easy way to watch the damn movie and listen to the damn song.
