In life, choosing the most aggressive path is not always a recipe for success, and the harder you push, the more enemies you can create. There’s a long list of stories about empires that expand and become paranoid, seeing enemies in every sphere of influence that can’t be negotiated with or understood. They usually exhaust and bankrupt themselves, corrupted from within by the effort to live up to their own hype and cut down by the real threats, the ones that couldn’t get knocked down by belligerent posturing.
The people who rise in their wake don’t have the brute force to solve all their problems with… um… brute force, so they have to get smarter, they have to find innovative solutions to their problems by absolute necessity and when they do, good things tend to happen. When you aim for effectiveness instead of a raw display of power, they often do.
You can’t give the RIAA much in the way of props for cutting back on the lawsuit thing, their actions aren’t the result of vision from an empire at the peak of its powers. They’re the actions of a group that tried the straight ahead force route and found they didn’t have the brute strength to pull it off. But even then, events have forced them to shy away from the PR disaster that is suing kids and old ladies. In exchange for strength, they might be gaining effectiveness.
The new strategy involves sending letters to a very willing partner – the ISP’s, who HATE power up/down/anything loaders. These letters will talk about the massive amounts of uploading going on on p2p or torrents or wherever, and the ISP will forward the textual beatdown to the users. That alone should intimidate them out of the tune business, but if they go forward with it, the ISP will slow their downloads or freeze them out altogether. The label cuts piracy, the ISP saves bandwidth – everyone wins!
Well, except for customers, but that is to be expected. Ten years after Napster, there still hasn’t been an effective business model that understands the Internet era, and I’m afraid that by the time they do, they’ll be even further behind. Maybe a topic for another time but… harddrives are only getting bigger…
[...] When you go against your core nature or your own self interest, or you require others to go against theirs, you will lose a hundred percent of the time. You can’t expect anyone established to fall on their sword and sign on with their label instead of Ticketmaster for their shows, and you can’t expect anyone to pay 25 bucks for a CD (and I swear to Jihad I saw a new CD for $25 at Barnes and Noble, it almost blew my mind). It’s about about setting realistic expectations in order to be effective. [...]