What does it mean to own a file?
The traditional thinking of selling the "container" has everything to do with consumers' psychological need to "own" something. I own a car-race game software when I can buy it and take it home. I own a music CD when I can buy it and stash it at home.
The seller offers the container for consumers to purchase for ownership. In an equation like this, it's only natural that the seller/producer will hold the completeness of the contents in the container in very high regard. For a music album that has ten songs, the ten songs must be in uniform in style and be arranged in a specific order, not to mention the design of the CD case and the wardrobe choice of the artist him/herself.
The same is true of newspapers, magazines, movies, PC games, curricula, you name it. The effort on the part of producers to edit or, if your will, compose the content and then have it wrapped up nice and neat in a package serves to endow the product with commercial appeal to consumers, who whip out their wallet when whey find the commodity standing as an indivisible item and a keeper.
This way of handling content, however, are being seriously challenged in the Internet age. After all, this is a time when a consumer will demand the option buying any three out of the ten songs from an album. By making such a demand, the consumer is rejecting the seven other songs that's not music to his/her ears as well as the CD case. However, by setting the music files free from the CD, people are making it possible to file owners to share them on the Internet at will, sometimes illegally.
What's being described here is a scenario in which consumers have narrowed down their unit of ownership to a song, instead of an entire CD album. With this change, the ownership of the songs tends to be diminished. It's so easy get hold of these three songs in electronic files via the Internet that people succeed in doing so won't think much of the transfer.
It used to be when a famous singer released an album that featured unique appearance and a set number of CDs released around the world, fans will go all out to get one. Even if the songs are bound to fall out of the Billboard rankings in due course, such CD will still appeal to collectors.
However, it's a far cry from that with the digital content, which can be copied an infinite number of times and then spread as far as the Internet can go. Compared to tradition existence of music on CD and movies on DVD, music and movie files, even when protected by copyright, can seem so ethereal that its ownership feels like nada.
The music downloading service has become a hit in Europe and US because it sells every song for US$0.99, which is considered cheap in Europe and US, and the files sold there are protected by copyrights. However, such a business model should run into trouble pretty soon.
How did you handle the old music CDs in your home? Those has-beens that were popular at the time and bought on the spur of the moment almost always ended up alone in a corner, never to be listened to again. Before you know it, there is a mountain of such CDs in you home, and you don't know what to do with it.
In a parallel universe, where you paid for ten music files by three recording artists every time, you will also soon become the owner of hundreds of songs in digital form. Again, new songs will keep on coming out to inundate your hard disc and push your old songs under wraps of memory, will you simply erase them or just leave them alone?
Same question, Alternatively put. If you are not a collector or someone whose heart is set upon starting a digital library since digital files hardly qualify as collectibles, what's the point of having the music download into your PC hard disk to take up storage?
Let me refresh your memory of the three musts of digital content business. They are monthly fees, community, and real-time connection. Image a place on the Internet where you can pick out songs to hear whenever you want, all the while no music files are downloaded onto your PC.
That is, all the songs are stores in a remote server, which delivers the songs you order to you only on request. When you're done listening to them, no files will be left behind in your PC. For such an all-you-can-hear service, one might be charged an annual fee of US$13 or so.
As a subscriber to such a service, you will always have the newest songs to hear and you will never need to buy any CDs, download any files, and clean out you hard disc again. ADSL broadband connection is already a household fixture now. Music is almost automatic whenever a PC is turned on. That is, it makes no difference if you have the files on your disc. They are yours on request.
This is what real-time connection is capable of. Scraping the obsession of selling containers started with giving up selling the compact disc and went on to giving up selling the files. At a time when bandwidth is no longer an issue, when music files are available through several mouse clicks, selling the music files seems simply pointless.
Earlier on, other types of digital contents have been revolutionized. Take audiovisual programs for example. Right now, Internet TV operators in Taiwan have all launched monthly fees that come in US$8-9 for an all-you-can-watch subscription. They have almost all turned profitable.
Subscribers do not need to download these programs onto their hard discs. Instead, they watch via video streaming. When they're done watching, there will be no digital leftovers in their PC. For one thing, audiovisual files are too big to be downloaded. Sure. But the truth is eBook and digital music can also find this mode of business applicable.
Only in one situation will the consumers want to download the files. That is, portable device owners might sometimes want the music files on their MP3 players or eBook files on their PDAs.
Even that may soon become redundant as future portable devices improve in capability of being connected to the Internet. In fact, almost all PDAs are Internet-ready, some via WLAN, other via GPRS nowadays, rendering it unnecessary to download digital contents on PC and then transfer them onto PDAs, as PDAs have Internet connection of their own.
When digital content is at one's fingertips any time on request, consumers virtually own the content. For people who still find this virtual ownership unacceptable, they can still fall back on CDs, books, DVDs, whose value as collectibles remains undeniable.
2004/09/26 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to
China Internet/Telecom )
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