== A thought on iTunes and similar online services

What iTunes and similar online services are really selling is
convenience and guilt-avoidance, with a small side order of helping
out the artists. They're manifestly not selling the music itself (or
videos or etc), since you can find them online yourself if you look hard
enough.

The 'helping out the artists' bit is currently only a small side order
because most everyone understands at some level how little of the money
involved actually makes it to the artists.

The guilt-avoidance is not a good long term thing to base your business
on, because there's an increasing amount of evidence that the current
generation of teenagers feels very little guilt about this stuff to
start with. (Partly, I like to suspect, because very few people feel
very much guilt about not giving money to visibly rapacious record
companies.)

On a legal front, the highest payoff is from closing down non-authorized
services that make it convenient to find this stuff on the Internet,
because they are your primary competition in the long term.

(Not only is suing individual downloaders time-consuming for a low
payoff, but young people famously feel that they're immortal and that
the odds don't apply to them, hence I think it has a low deterrent
value.)

Odious DRM is thus cold-bloodedly counterproductive because it reduces
the convenience factor.

(And iTunes et al can be viewed as a grand experiment in how much pain
consumers will put up with before you drive them into the arms of more
obscure, non-authorized sources. The early music company online music
store attempts have already given us some data points.)