The value of a song

I’ve been thinking about copyright infringement for a long time. These days, every record company wants complete control over distribution of the songs they produced and they’ll do anything to punish consumers who would share those songs digitally. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know about the war against consumers and the lawsuits over file sharing.

In any situation, it’s important to follow the law and avoid wrongdoing, but it’s clear that the law currently has failed to keep up with how the market has changed. Sharing always existed before the Internet with mixtapes and the like, where one could share songs with their friends, but digital file sharing made it possible for people to share songs with complete strangers. Nowadays you can be a “distributor” and a file in your possession could be downloaded by thousands of people in a day, all whom you have probably never met. Things are very different now.

The way I see it, the record industry currently puts a lot of value on the individual song; the “entity” of which every copy, whether on tangible media like CDs or in digital form like MP3s, must be paid for. If that song is in any way in your possession, the record company expects to have received a monetary sum for it. That’s the current model. What I’ve decided in the past few days, however, is that the individual song is worthless. The whole music business model should change to reflect that. Let me explain further…

When CDs were the latest and greatest music format, you went to the store and paid, say, $12.99 for a disc that had 12 songs by some artist you liked. With that disc came a spiffy jewel box and an album insert which had pictures, lyrics, and credits for all the songs. You could keep this disc for yourself and pop it into your stereo every time you wanted to hear it, or you could wrap it up and give it to someone as a gift. These made great presents.

Now think about this: let’s say you like Counting Crow’s August and Everything After as much as I did when I was 8 years old. In 1993, would you have paid $12.99 for this album off the shelf, or would you have paid $5 for a blank disc that just had the 11 songs in CD quality but no art or accompanying booklet? How about if you were buying this for someone else? I’m going to assume more people would have opted for the off the shelf album, especially when buying gifts.

Personally, in both cases, I would have paid $12.99 for the shelf version. It was not only because I liked getting an attractive album insert complete with lyrics and pictures; it was also because the real deal looked a lot nicer on my CD tower than a plain jewel case with a blank disc inside (or a silver disc that I wrote on with a Sharpie). The reality of this, however, is that between the $5 plain disc and the $12.99 shelf album, the quality of the songs is the same. The songs themselves are the same. The difference in price has nothing to do with the songs. It has everything to do with the experience.

To me, songs are worthless. Experiences are golden.

I think $0.99 is too much for a song, DRM’d or not. I would, however, pay $50 to see Daft Punk perform the equivalent of 10 songs in concert. You could say that was $5 a song, and $10 if I buy two tickets, but I’m not buying songs. I’m buying the experience of seeing and hearing Daft Punk perform live, with the same songs I can download for free from a random stranger over the Internet.

If Daft Punk’s next album came in a $20 box set that included a DVD of their music videos, action figures of Guy-Man and Thomas, a mini-poster, and the full set of songs in CD format, I would definitely buy it. I would buy it, not for the digital content that I can get for free anywhere, which make the DVD and CD almost worthless, but for the action figures and the mini-poster, and the fact that it all comes together in a spiffy package. If I were getting someone a gift, and I knew they were a Daft Punk fan, I would much prefer to give them this set than a $20 iTunes gift card. And if the CD included digital copies of all the songs that I could upload to my computer without any fuss, rather than having to rip them myself, that would be doubly awesome.

I think if every movie and album that came out would come in a complete package like this, rather than just a disc that has nothing more than digital content, people would be far more compelled to buy rather than download. As it is, I just don’t consider an individual music file to be worth anything at all, and if it became impossible to get songs for free, that wouldn’t compel me to buy some of the MP3s I have now. I would rather just do without them. I would, however, continue to be a consumer of experiences from the artists I like, and I’m hoping the music industry will realize where the true value lies and start selling more of that. Or maybe artists will realize they don’t need the record companies to make a living and they’ll go it alone. Either way, I hope the record industry will stop punishing consumers for sharing something that has no value at all.