Protect customers from competitors
We are often asked how the internet has affected our business. To be honest, we don’t know. Since we are still a small label that grows and our potential is not yet utilized, we haven’t experienced any slip in sales. Maybe we would sell more copies if there wasn’t such a thing as filesharing, on the other hand many people, especially in countries where our records are hard to find, would have never heard about us, if it wasn’t for “illegal downloading”.
Both may be the case, but it doesn’t matter anyway. We couldn’t stop filesharing even if we wanted to, so we have do deal with it by releasing high quality music, providing nice packaging for our releases and finding loyal fans who like to support us and our artists (which we would also do if there wasn’t any “music piracy”).
One attempt to “protect” the music - mainly used by the major labels - was and still is digital rights management (DRM) and copy protection. But now it’s obviously not only utilized to prevent illegal copying, but also to badmouth competitors. At the expense of the customers and artists. How annoying and stupid is that?
Even more reasons to get pissed about the copy protection mechanisms can be found here.
November 2nd, 2005
