ignoring cost, piracy vs. legit retailers.

Sometime in the last year, I read a Yahoo exec (Ian Rogers) talking about the future of music. His major point was that the power legal alternatives to downloading had was the ability to add context to consumption - he was willing to admit that the legal music biz had already lost in terms of what people considered the first stop, to consider developing the creation of context and extra content to go with music as an alternative business model.

This is a very good approach to the issue of competing with piracy. If music is already free, what do you sell? However, it appears that the glacial reaction times of the music industry have struck again. The Pirate Bay, beloved destination of copyright criminals everywhere, has (I know not when) started to add context to the files available for download. The kind of context that, arguably, makes the sites illegal downloads a boon to artists, as it shares the albums available from the back catalogue, upcoming shows, and similar artists.

For a look at the Justice artist page, click here.

There is no huge incentive for those at The Pirate Bay to make provisions for this information, it just makes it a better place for users, and make the tools available more complete. Justice, or their label, aren't paying anyone to do this. But it's getting done.

This is why legal music always falls short of the service offered by the illegally downloaded content available. The format is always better, it's always easier (to the suitably tech-savvy), it always works, and there are less hoops to jump through. But most importantly, the focus is always on what will make the users happier - the music industry should be focused on the same thing (considering it would sell records), but instead they skip the keep-customers-happy step, and try to focus more directly on how to sell digital music.

And they fail. Again.