Just read a piece from Clay Shirky on micropayments. He makes a couple of good observations, but seems to fail on this one:
People are not paying for music on ITMS because we have decided that fee-per-track is the model we prefer, but because there is no market in which commercial alternatives can be explored.
I think given the subscription models from Microsoft and Yahoo, as well as the current existing CD-in-store model, people are paying the fee-per-track precisely because they *do* prefer it. I worked in music retail back in the early 90′s, around the time that the major labels slowly stopped putting out singles (vinyl was gone, but cassette singles were around as well as the odd CD-single). Major music companies seemed to actively put the kibosh on mass market singles, forcing people in to purchasing entire albums just to get the 1-2 songs they wanted.
Entire Napster, which demonstrated people really wanted ala carte tracks. Napster was shut down, but iTunes was there at the ready, to allow people to get just the tracks that they wanted. Given the billion + tracks they’ve sold, I suspect it’s a model many people prefer. If you want an entire album you can get it as well, either from iTunes, or Amazon or still on physical CD from many stores.
So why does Clay think there’s no market for alternatives? iTunes *is* the alternative.
I wasn’t clear — yes, paying per tune is preferable to paying for albums, but Napster was preferable to ITMS. Now Napster is illegal, of course, but that’s the point: there are no technological barriers to distributing music in ways that users prefer *enormously* over ITMS, but the legal barriers keep those preferences from being expressed. Journalism has no such set of legal barriers to keep user preferences bottled up.
Got it. I probably jumped on that one statement more than I meant to. It just jumped out at me so directly!