Music downloads - Paying and not paying with social capital

Image source: Author's photo

For those who download music illegally, what is the value of a paid digital download? Recent studies seem to suggest a highly subjective moral value, but is that the same economic value we once attributed to CDs, cassettes and vinyl?

I've heard various people suggest that the experience of purchasing and listening to a physical album (discussions with record store employees, looking through the liner notes and artwork, listening with others) does not compare to a digital download. Yet there is a culture associated with downloads. People derive social capital from sharing music for download because others respond, discussion is generated, and people are exposed to new music.

The music industry isn't going to be able to turn the social capital of music into premium content, but could they monetise it? Ping, iTune's inbuilt social network, is Apple's attempt to derive sales from the social value of music. It doesn't introduce any new premium content, but it does provide a new arena for digital music culture to play out, one where social content is linked to legitimate downloads.

Because it doesn't eliminate illegal music sharing or introduce new premium digital content, Ping is not a premium paywall but a "paycorridor". The social capital generated by Ping users guides them away from illegal downloads and towards the iTunes store.

Importantly, artists (or at least their PR) are users of Ping. The point of connection betweens fans and artists is a potential site for future premium content.

Can the music industry dance to the Club Penguin boogie?

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The music industry says that P2P hurts artists (and the industry), but P2P users have become accustomed to downloading music for free. Is freemium a potential compromise?

In this week's lecture we briefly discussed a hypothetical music business model that balances unpaid digital downloads with ticket sales for live concerts... Hmm... Sounds like freemium! You get unrestricted access to the main course – songs, in digital form – but you don't get dessert – live gigs, standard and limited physical releases – unless you pay.

Compare this pay-for-concerts model to the Club Penguin model and you see an immediate difference. Where's the premium digital content? Club Penguin's physical merchandise can be equated with the concerts and physical albums from our music model. However, Club Penguin's subscriber content constitutes an additional digital-only category of premium content. If you give away digital songs, what do you have to offer as paid-for digital content?

Perhaps the music industry needs to find something other than songs to offer as premium digital content. How about a live stream of a studio performance that can only be accessed with a unique code that you receive after purchasing songs? This example may not be the best (someone could record and distribute the stream!), but my intention is to suggest that this way of thinking merits further investigation.

Our hypothetical model seems to come close to the current reality of the music business, with one major difference: people are paying for digital downloads. The Norwegian research discussed in lecture and a 2006 Canadian RIAA study both seem to indicate a self-mediated freemium among P2P users, whereby each user determines what they personally deem to be content worth paying for from the pool of free content. Maybe this shows that services like Spotify and KKBOX, which separate song content into free and premium versions before reaching the consumer, have a valid place in the market.

Compromise seems increasingly necessary, but the music industry would prefer access to digital songs to be completely locked down. If Apple found a way to block all illegally procured content from your iWhatever-you-use, would you continue to use it or seek out an alternative?

The iPodfather

Who is Steve Jobs? Only the CEO of Apple, the leading consumer technology company in the world. No biggie.He's not an actor, musician, model or anything important like that, so why dedicate a blog to him?

I've previously not even given this guy a second thought. But Steve Jobs matters more than any celebrity, not merely for the fact that he helped to engineer the pretty MacBook that I'm typing this on.

A quick bio reads like this:

• Jobs founded Apple, out of his basement, and basically revolutionised personal computing.
• He was fired from Apple, the business that he helped create, in 1985.
• He went on to found NeXT (a computer company) and Pixar.
• Apple purchased NeXT and in 1998, Jobs was back at as CEO of Apple.
• From there till now, Apple has given the world the iPod, iPhone and iPad alongside several personal computers

Steve Jobs basically then, can be credited with the content that we study in this paper. For instance, the iPod introduced us to the first ultra-portable music player, which meant that you could carry your entire music library with you, with a ten hour battery life. Unheard of. On top of that, without Steve Jobs we wouldn't have had Toy Story or Finding Nemo. Eek.

Without these technologies, some of the current issues and debates would possibly not be circulating, such as Mark Bauerlein's concern's of "The Dumbest Generation", or more recently, the health risks such as hearing loss and pedestrian deaths associated with these technologies. Not to mention the issues of advertising, gender and many of the other topics discussed in this course.

Without Steve Jobs at the helm of Apple, would the phenomena of the personal computer of the ultra-portable mP3 player have occurred? Did Jobs merely accelerate the inventions? Or is he simply a face behind a collaborative effort?

In light of what I have discovered about Jobs, I would like to suggest that he has not singlehandedly, but in large part, transformed and moulded the present technoculture. He is The iPodfather.

Jobs for the (Play)boys

Yes, I'm a frustrated headline writer. Anyway, apropos of this week's topic, here's an interesting piece on the rather awkward way in which squeaky-clean Apple and squeaky-but-not-so-clean Playboy have come to a mutual arrangement for the iPad.

mMmMm..... Apples.........

As I lay me down to sleep, I give Steve Jobs my soul to keep, and if I die before I wake my 4th gen Iphone they won't take..... I wanna be buried with the thing!

Have people begun to create this new society where technology has turned into the new religion? Honestly I think they have. Take the.... Well the Ianything really, Steve Jobs has created a huge fan base for his technology and more importantly the 'apple' brand itself, from the first generation Ipod to the brand new Ipad people across the world line up for hours in front of stores in the freezing cold or boiling sun just so they can say they got their Iwhatever on the very day it came out. Never mind that if they waited 6 months they could get it cheaper and a version without all the faults and bugs that any first generation piece of technology is bound to have.

You can see from each of these videos the changes that Jobs has made in the way he addresses his audience (followers, congregation?) as the popularity of his techno-toys grew over the years. From the low key presentation of the first Ipod to the over the top revel of the Iphone he has gone from merely introducing people to a new piece of technology to create a giant spectacle similar to the televangelists you would see at 5am on channel 2 in the mornings. The way Steve Jobs talks about these products and the way people react to them you'd think he had just discovered the cure for cancer and was planning on giving it to the world at half price. Because at the end of the day, no matter how crazy people go for these products, they are JUST a computer or JUST a phone, they just happen to look a little sleeker and sexier than some of the other products out there.

Religion of Apple + iPhone

Excellent piece about the "Religion of Apple" and the 'Jesus' mysticism associated w/the iPhone.

Note: You'll need to be logged in @the Uni (or the library proxy) to access this to save and/or print

Marketing prof Russell Belk of York University and Gulnur Tumbat of San Francisco State study the parallels between Apple's fanbase and the followers of religion, assembling a framework for Apple's mystical mythology. They believe the entire Apple brand is based on four key myths. Heidi Campbell, a scholar at Texas A&M aggregated their work for a recent article

"How the iPhone became divine"

Here are Campbell's four key "myths" about Apple:

1. a creation myth highlighting the counter-cultural origin and emergence of the Apple Mac as a transformative moment
2. a hero myth presenting the Mac and its founder Jobs as saving its users from the corporate domination of the PC world
3. a satanic myth that presents Bill Gates as the enemy of Mac loyalists;
4. and, finally, a resurrection myth of Jobs returning to save the failing company...

Abstract: This article explores the labeling of the iPhone as the ‘Jesus phone’ in order to demonstrate how religious metaphors and myth can be appropriated into popular discourse and shape the reception of a technology. We consider the intertextual nature of the relationship between religious language, imagery and technology and demonstrate how this creates a unique interaction between technology fans and bloggers, news media and even corporate advertising.