August 15, 2003
Changes of note
Victor Keegan, editor for The Guardian, has written an interesting article on how the Internet revolutionises the ways in which songs can be distributed and that the music industry must adapt or fade away.
Keagan thinks the ringtones market is particularly interesting, because it turns traditional economic theory on its head.
"People are prepared to pay more for less: up to £3.50 per download for a clip from a whole song that can now be downloaded from the web for 75p. You would think that the ringtone from a song would be given away free as an incentive to buy the whole track.
If anything, it is the other way round, and recalls another example of inversionary economics that I have never been able to understand.
Ringtones, of course, like branded T-shirts, are bought as street-savvy symbols of where we are coming from, a public display of self-identification. For that, apparently, no price is too high.
There is another reason why people pay high prices for ringtones: an existing, and painless, payment system. You download, and don't feel the cost until your monthly telephone bill, in which the download is lost among numerous other payments, comes in."
But Keegan thinks this might all come to an end, "this will have a number of interesting consequences. Firstly, the £3.50 ringtone will die a speedy digital death. No one, surely, is going to pay £3.50 for a track that they can download for 75p and then use the opening bars as a ringtone".
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