4 ms·

>I don't think even the music industry would complain about people giving their music away for free if they want to. It devalues their product (in their mind).

• jacquesm 14y ago
  > Competition with lower price is not good for business. It's not that simple. Competition with lower price points can drive innovation and reduce costs and hence can lead to an increase in volume that more than makes up for the reduced prices. In the case of digital music with a potential market of 100's of millions of consumers and a baseline of anywhere between 10K and 200K for a professionally produced piece of music it could very well be more profitable to sell your content to a much larger audience at $0.30 than to a smaller one at $.99 Without competition people would get stuck at unrealistically high price-points and we'd all be that much poorer (culturally) for that. Musique pour supermarché is a nice example of how far you could push that. It made a fraction of what it would have made if it were released. Competition driving lower prices would unlock a much larger market. Of course from a monopoly position such competition always looks bad, especially if you can squeeze both the consumer and the producer. This mechanism doesn't hold forever, here is a lower boundary where you will no longer be making more profits and that sweet spot is the point where most of all the sellers will congregate. Given that the cost of distribution is negligible (music tends to spread for free) you'd need a way to piggy-back onto the music being played rather than the music being transferred to side-step the issues of piracy.