It's fitting that some variant of Canute (the king who allegedly trying to stop the tide coming in) is often evoked to explain the futility of chasing after file sharing pirates... of even thinking in piratical terms.
The fact is that ubiquitous, weightless, incrementally costless 'content' in the form of MP3 files (mostly) changes all. One of the final (we have more), crowning arguments over the telecoms package and the arid debate over 'piracy' that accompanies it, concerns the fact that 'digital' is more than just another 'format'.
In the music context, especially, 'digital' is not like the cassette tape or the compact disk, capable of being repackaged into a familiar shape to continue the old recorded music business model.
Digital is a once-and-for-all change that, amongst other things, separates music from physical medium and changes its relationship to the consumer in the process. Music becomes personal content. In a connected digital world, music is adopted rather than owned: it becomes another marker of identity, a token of tribal and personal exchange.
It is on your website, on your ring-tone, on your iPod. It's a flexible colourant and as such, an incredibly powerful marketing tool. If only record companies could grasp this and adapt their business models to go with the flow, everyone would end up better off.
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