It is not unreasonable to suppose that prices for music distributed on the internet could be set so low that it is literally more cost effective to buy it than to go to the trouble of pirating it.

Good point. As it stands right now, the cost of producing audio CDs En Masse is practically nil. The real costs are in marketing and distribution. If an artist distributes through the internet, that's half the equation. The other half is tough, though. The marketing engines of the record companies are heavily entrenched and it will take a while for this to shift. It'll happen, but slowly. For a while, it'll be like it is right now: you'll only see indie music and unknown artists distributed on the 'net. But one day, there will be a major announcement: a big-name artist will deliberately allow his record company contract to lapse, and will go indie so that they can distribute and market their music exclusively via the internet. Then the world will wake up to the possibility of direct artist-consumer relations and we'll see the culmination of this little revolution. All it'll take is one really big artist. Who's up for the challenge?

I guess the biggest problem involved in this kind of direct distribution is handling the bookkeeping. The first model that comes to my mind is, of course, the credit card, but there may well be other methods I am not familiar with for handling internet credit transactions.

Already there. Check out PayPal. This is one of those "Slap your forehead and say DUH" ideas that I wish I'd thought of first.



Tony Fabris
Empeg #144