The Industry is the Problem as is the Consumer: Beware the Internet

I happen to know the Consumer and I have been in retail before trying to sell NEW TECHNOLOGY!    So on a historic note lets look back; and I do like to harp back to those halcyon days when I was at the forefront of Digital Delivery of Music, here are some tidbits.   Telcos were offering us E1 lines at 6MBs/s for the transfer of data and we saw the possibility to bring new services to consumers who would be hungry to pay to download music.   What a great Business Model – no stock, no distribution costs, maximise distribution range, instnant gratification etc. etc.  However on route to all the riches of the land the Music Industry specialists dissed MP3 , which came along  a year or so after we were offering our solution, because the quality was never going to be good enough for the Consumer.  Duh! I was using this as a USP in my literature.   We had also “Protected” the content with DRM and were offering immediate royalty payments to the Artists, Labels and Music Catalogues…It seemed to be a perfect business model:  The music was protected, sold directly, paid for instantly and enjoyed immediately.  The  Consumer and moreso the Music Industry rejected it.    They did not embrace it and feared the Piracy would increase.  In a nutshell they couldn’t re-organise their old ways, contracts were not compatible and their ancient modus operandi did not fit to this new technology.  So they chose to ignore it and battle on.  Consumers got savvy had computers, connected to the Internet and WWW and started to get what they wanted for free.  Do I hear History Repeating Itself?

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