NET RESULTS:Eircom has turned up the amplifier to try to capture or retain customers who believe music is best free
FREE MUSIC. If you believe the music industry it’s why most of us have signed up for broadband internet connections. And Eircom is now hoping it’s one of the weapons in its arsenal that can help it stem the flow of its customers to other operators.
People pirate music because there either isn’t a legal alternative or, if there is, it’s inconvenient or over-priced. Peer-to-peer technology made it easy to download music with no regard to copyright.
The competing legal services were expensive – generally being priced at the same level as physical CDs despite the costs of production and distribution online being a fraction of the record shop model. The music purchased legally online was also hobbled with Digital Rights Management (DRM), which restricted what devices the files could be played back on.
This made absolutely no sense as the industry was happy to sell CDs at a similar price which your average teen could rip and upload to Napster in the same time it took a record company executive to groom his ponytail in the morning.
In 2005, Sony famously shot itself in the foot by secretly including spyware on some of its CDs to prevent consumers copying them.
Apple’s launch of its iTunes music store in 2003 improved the simplicity and brought prices down somewhat but, in order to get the major labels on side, Steve Jobs and co were forced to develop FairPlay, its own DRM system. It ensured that iTunes-purchased music could only be played on five different PCs or iPods.
It was only at the start of last year that Apple managed to convince the music industry that selling DRM-free versions of its music on iTunes would not sound the death-knell of the industry.
Itunes still accounts for the bulk of digital music sales in Ireland but Eircom is hoping to muscle in on the space.
Back in January 2009, Eircom reached an out-of-court settlement with the music industry over the thorny issue of file-sharing. Eircom agreed to introduce a “graduated response” whereby it would ultimately cut off customers who were found by the record labels to be repeatedly sharing copyrighted material. At the time, both sides said they would create an online music store for Eircom customers to offer a legitimate alternative to file-sharing.
Much later than initially billed, Eircom’s MusicHub debuted this week. Launching with over two million tracks available from both indie and major labels, the service will expand to 4.5 million tracks in the new year.
While the download prices are good – as low as 32 cent a track for Eircom broadband subscribers – the real innovation is that Eircom’s own customers get unlimited free streaming of the entire catalogue.
Swedish company Spotify popularised free ad-supported streaming that gives you access to a large catalogue of music from an internet-connected PC, but the service is not available in Ireland unless you can cloak your location.
According to Stephen Beynon, managing director of consumer and small business with Eircom, customers told the telco that a streaming music service would have to be free to convince them not to switch provider. As a result, Eircom is paying for the service on behalf of its customers.
That’s the carrot. But the stick is that Eircom is continuing to implement graduated response and is processing about 1,000 complaints a week from the music industry who monitor peer-to-peer networks for sharing by Eircom customers.
This approach may work with the over-30s but I have severe doubts that either Eircom or the music industry will be able to change the habits of “digital natives”. This is the generation who have grown up snacking on the free lunch of the internet and take an open, uncensored internet for granted and are increasingly prepared to act to defend it.
The differing world views and moral compasses of the two were thrown into sharp relief this week.
Governments and large corporations around the world moved in concert to cut the WikiLeaks website off from the rest of the internet and put its founder Julian Assange out of circulation.
Anonymous, an ephemeral, ever-changing group spawned by the mischief-making, chaotic 4Chan message boards, took matters into its own hands and launched attacks on the websites of Mastercard, Visa and Paypal, among others, after they cut off accounts being used to fundraise for WikiLeaks.
"We're against corporations and government interfering on the internet," an Anonymous spokesman called Coldblood told the Guardianthis week. "We believe it should be open and free for everyone. Governments shouldn't try to censor because they don't agree with it."
A letter purporting to be from Anonymous, which was posted to Google’s blogger service, was even more direct: “The goal is simple: win the right to keep the internet free of any control from any entity, corporation or government. We will do this until our, proverbial, dying breath. We do this not only for ourselves, but for the world and its people at large.”
Beynon says those who believe they have a moral right to “steal music online” do not make up a significant part of the Eircom customer base.
He may be correct but, as events this week demonstrate, their children most probably do. And as the acts of Anonymous have shown, they don’t take kindly to the freedoms they enjoy on the internet being interfered with.
