Music Piracy War: A waste of time?

[Torplexed]

I think that the idea of free music on the internet is so powerful not because it’s free, but because it allows us to minimize the risk of being cheated. Free is so enticing because it eliminates the risk of buyer’s remorse. Nobody wants to buy something and then discover that it’s not what they expected. Even if the price of that thing is just a few cents, the psychological aversion still exists. When something is free, that risk is eliminated entirely. It may still not be what you expected, but at least you didn’t lose anything by paying for it.

There’s an entire group of people under the age of about 30 who believe that music should be free because that’s the world they’ve grown up in. So that’s where the future lies. The reason Steve Jobs and Apple have been so spectacularly successful at reinventing the music business is because they’re the only ones who’ve managed to invent a hardware and software platform that mitigates the risk factors involved in owning music and appeals to younger people. And they made it sexy and stylish. Apple didn’t win on technology. Nobody does, ultimately. They won on business smarts.