On Sony and AllofMp3.com

Here's another damning article about Sony Corp:
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. One of life's more satisfying ironies, however, is that the same fate often befalls those who fixate on history. Consider the coming train wreck of Sony's PlayStation 3.
The article goes on to list some of Sony's failures, like Betamax, DAT tape, and the MemoryStick. They are not only failures, but attempts by Sony to tie the customer to their (and only their) products. The article goes on to explain why the PS3 costs so much: blue-ray; which is yet another attempt to for Sony to lock you in. Now there are rumors that the PS3's "Cell" processor is seriously broken. All in all it doesn't look very good for Sony, and I would say the problem is systemic. That problem is greed.
It's even worse in the music industry (of which Sony owns it's fair share). The music industry knows that some people would pay a lot of money for an album from their favorite artist. Whenever they sell an album or song for less, they feel that they are loosing money. Their ideal model would be what the airline industry is able to do, charge different prices for the same seat in the same airplane.
This article talk about AllOfMp3.com where you can legally pay for and download whole albums for about US$1.50, and don't worry the artist also gets their cut. What really makes AllOfMp3 really shine is that the music you download is completely free of DRM. The reason that you can do this is that the laws in Russia are a little different when it comes to music and copyright.
The point of the article is that if the music industry wasn't so greedy and shortsighted, they would adopt this model in the US as well. If music is cheap enough people will purchase more of it, even for stuff they aren't sure that they will like. Or they are more likely to buy a whole album even if there is only one song that they like. And what has been shown in the past, the more you listen the more you buy. Basically, my take is that the music industry is too greedy - they should be looking for volume of sales and not price. I could easily see myself falling in love with an artist that I discovered by chance and then purchasing all of her (or his) other songs as well - if the price didn't break the bank as it does now.
Even more important for the music industry is if they continue to charge $0.99 per song with DRM crippling on top of that, more and more people will go to the darknet. This is a warning from four Microsoft employee's (of all people!) to the media industry to watch out; if you disgruntle enough customers they will discover and start using the darknet to get their music, for free and without DRM.

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