According to Universal Music Group, there are three kinds of music pirates. Those who don’t do it at all, those who do it as much as possible, and the kind mentioned in the title of this article. The dinner party pirates are the people who are stealing music because it’s just more convenient that way. Record execs are hoping to turn these people into a source of revenue.
On the bright side, the recording industry is learning. Before there were just pirates (read: everybody) and non-pirates. But over time, with the help of poorly done studies about how teenagers are now streaming music instead of pirating it, the industry is finally seeing that there is a class of consumer that just does whatever’s convenient. Yes, that is what the more technologically-versed have been screaming at the music industry for years.
The behavior that the recording industry is observing, and it’s a real one, is that users are becoming very accustomed to having internet everywhere. That means you don’t need to own as much music because you have streaming access. For the casual music fan, this is a nice alternative to having to buy music because it’s cheaper, and it does not require file management on a local machine. I suspect that if the iPod had been introduced to a world that did not files to be locally-stored for them to be accessible, it would not have been anywhere near as successful.
Of course, the record companies are still failing to recognize the more devoted music listener. Those are the kids on college campuses who are swapping music with each other, either by passing around USB drives or by using programs like Mojo. Yet that behavior too would be snuffed out if a highly popular music store such as iTunes just allowed people to listen to music before they bought it. This consumer group is one that still likes to have the high-capacity MP3 player because its constituents listen to a lot of music, and they care about quality and listening to albums and all that. The record industry is making progress in what it can see, but to this group, it’s still relatively blind.
