home taping is um....

[Gregory Taylor <gtaylor@xxxxxxxx>]

> From: John von Seggern <johnvon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> One interesting thing I've noticed in my own buying habits in the post-Napster
> era: not only am I buying more CDs overall than before, but also I am only
> buying CDs that I could never have possibly heard of before, sampling MP3s on
> the Net and ordering online from tiny independent labels in Germany for
> example...

I'm sorry, but I'm unable to pinpoint the precise source for
this - but there was a study of persons who used Napster
in a rather serious way which, upon perusal of *both* their
downloading habits *and* their habits as consumers came
to much the same conclusion: namely, that people will actually
bother to acquire what they value once they've heard it, and
particularly so if they think that they are contributing in some
direct way to an artist's well-being; it would appear that people
have figured out that downloading Rick Springfield's "Human
Touch" has little, if any effect on Rick Springfield. But the
same situation doesn't obtain on smaller economies of
scale for artists who work and labour in the present tense.
I don't think that it's any particular surprise that some
of the rhetoric on the part of the Recording Artists' Coalition
positions the artists themselves as individuals (albeit wealthy
ones, in some cases) operating on a small scale doing battle
with the large corporate entity.

The more interesting argument which evolves from this
comes from the shareware community, where some
members of that community have actually moved from
shareware to the time-limited trial world and discovered
that their sales skyrocketed. Perhaps we need time-limited
unlimited downloads of top 40 music. :-)