Editorials and Articles

The Death of P2P

I think you can finally say the p2p (peer to peer) file sharing systems like kazaa are dead in the water and with it the general free downloading of music on the internet. While some systems like bittorrent will continue to thrive in their small tech-geek niche, the days of joe surfer getting the new Jessica Simpson cd for free has gone the way of tight rolled guess jeans and hair sprayed poof balls. And before those at the RIAA start celebrating about how their tough cop antics of prosecuting teenage girls for theft actually worked, I’ll give you a more real world answer as to why it’s dead and it has nothing to do with legal ramifications.

What killed it was the peer itself, and more specifically greed of those peers. Which is surprising that the record company couldn’t see that coming and saved themselves millions in cash and who knows how much the bad pr cost. As in the real world whenever a group of people is grouped together in some sort of community, there will be a few who will take advantage of the others either thru theft, smooth talking etc. etc. So what happened was people realized that they could make money taking advantage of all the not so computer literate flocking to use this service. How you ask? When you install the actual sharing program, other software manufactures pay that company to include their program into the file sharing program, so in order to use the file sharing program you must have the other programs installed and running, mind you this all happens without you knowing, you already agreed to this when you installed the file sharing program, check the fine print…. What these programs do is track where and what you see on the web and usually will offer pop up banners for similar products, and since the ad is being opened by an installed program, it won’t get stopped by a pop up blocker. It’s like clicking on a link in a word doc, and connecting to the net. Now someone is paying a fraction of a cent for each time an ad is shown, now multiple that by everyone using a file share system usually in the millions, now multiple that by say 5 ads per person per web surfing session (the programs run 24/7 whether you are downloading or not) and you are talking some serious money. This doesn’t even account for the money made just selling your surfing habits which are a premium for internet marketers. What’s bad is that done carefully and without greed, you would never know what was going on, a couple of well made spyware programs can run on your computer forever without being noticed or affecting computer speed. But money talked so more and more software got added to the install, and the software got sneakier in efforts to bypass spyware detection programs. These programs can open up a backdoor and install even more of their programs onto your system, and it all appears normal to your computer. As more and more programs start running computer performance begins to get effected more and more, until your computer is a crawl and you don’t know why. Then everyone wanted in on the game, so people started to play the system, hiding their own spyware programs as mp3s, and these spyware are the really nasty ones too, they are the ones that just throw pop ups at you till your computer crashes. They also open the backdoor, and fill your computer with all sorts of crap programs. These are also the programs that hijack your homepage and default search engines. While genius programming is behind all the software, common sense is not, nowadays after getting infected a computer is almost immediately unusable online. If you aren’t online they aren’t getting paid, not very smart there as the revenue stream is disabled before it can provide any return. Pure greed and impatience, a constant stream over time makes a lot more than a one time payoff.

No matter how much you want to hear a song nothing is worse than having a computer crash, unless it’s taking that crashed computer to the local geek store and explain to them how it wasn’t porn you were looking at and paying a bunch of money to have it fixed. Usually after one repair bill comes the end of using p2p, as that is what the geek said caused it. As this scenario plays its way across the world, you have less and less real people offering up real files to share. This causes the available pool of downloads to fill more and more up with the bogus spyware programs. Making it easier and easier for this scenario to keep playing out until all is left is the bogus stuff.

But while the RIAA may think of this as a win, but really they got beat. For $10 a month I can listen to pretty much anything I would ever want to listen to as much as I want thru rhapsody, before all this downloading stuff started I would have had to go out and buy the cds to hear what I wanted at $15 bucks a pop. I don’t know what world the record execs live in but a $3 cord hooked into a normal stereo turns your home computer into your home stereo, or a $20 set of powered speakers and the computer is a good stereo on its own. So for $10 bucks my “cd” collection contains over a million songs, that are impossible to steal from parties. Do the math, that’s quite a bit of money they are losing.
So I can’t burn it to a cd?, big deal who needs to? I’d be playing the cd thru the computer anyway so you saved me a step thanks. And using an mp3 player, that most everyone has anymore, that same music can be loaded up and taken to cars, other houses, parties etc.
Anyone with half a brain and spare time can rig up a way to copy the songs you haven’t paid for, just think of the old days with a tape recorder and a radio. Oh but you say the production costs and what-not are so much lower selling digital music over real music. Ok everyone who has done the diy route knows how cheap it is to buy cdrs and go to kinkos for quality printing, now think of the bulk discount those record companies get from whoever they buy from, we are probably talking pennies per unit, with most of the cost in the plastic case. Right but they have a lot of R+D costs recording time etc they have to recoup. That is correct, but are they going to promote less for that digital copy? Does the studio give a break since it isn’t going to to be on a cd? No. So roughly they have as much tied into the mp3s as they do the cds . Only I can buy the mp3s for 39 cents, which let’s call $5.00 per “cd” instead of the $15.00 at a store. That is quite a price swing. Assume rhapsody gets the same cut as a normal music store so it all scales the same, and you then have to assume you are paying $10 for some pictures you will look at once and a plastic case that if doesn’t break when you try and open the theft proof seal just provides an easy carrying case and advertisement to a thief. So now for 5 bucks I can get the exact same thing 15 used to buy, only without the throwaway garbage (I mean who cares who the band thanks other than the peoples whose names are in it), plus this “cd” can’t be stolen, or wear out or get lost.? How many times have you had to re-purchase all your favorite cds for one reason or another? How many people do you know that have had to as well? That cash cow is now gone.

Makes you wonder what would have happened if the record companies wouldn’t have made such a fuss. Without their outcry there was no media story, no media story meant everyone’s grandma and grandpa wouldn’t know what napster and kazaa was. Without the mass influx of newly informed people of how to get free music, p2p would have either continued operating in a quiet little corner of the web or suffer its death due to greed like it is now. The result would have been no need for these downloading services like rhapsody and the new napster to exist, the record companies grudgingly accepted them with a “better than nothing” attitude. They want that $15 sale a lot more than the $5 one no matter what they say. This could also effectively kill the “filthy rich rock star” as well, since there is going to be an obvious cash shortage in the future, they can’t pay what they don’t have. So a way to look at it is the music biz (artists included) greed drove up the price of cds, when it takes 3-4 hours working at min. wage to make enough to buy a cd, a free alternative is enticing, add in the rise of the internet and it all fits together nicely. One thing about the internet is that numbers don’t mean quite the same, sites can operate with hundreds of thousands to millions of visitors/users and never be in the public eye at all. So peer to peer could have operated at the same level of participation it was at when the RIAA started to complain, and no one would have known and it wouldn’t have grown as big as fast just sorted existed kinda like bittorrent.(if you have to ask case in point). What I think happened was some pencil pusher saw a few hundred thousand people times $15 per cd being traded and went wow. What they didn’t realize was that one chances are that the music being traded was not going to be bought by the downloader if the download wasn’t there, “if it’s free I’ll take it but I’m not going to pay for it” type of deal. In the smaller setting like p2p was, it was more of a community with people actually buying cds and sharing with others that were buying different cds, it wasn’t until after it became widespread that you had the users that just downloaded and didn’t add new material.. How did it get widespread? Once they RIAA started grumbling about it and the media picked up on it. In an effort to try and stop a small amount of people from trading music they wouldn’t buy, they ended up having to offer their bread and butter consumers worldwide the same exact product for a 1/3 less money.
Oh well goodbye Kazaa thanks for the good times, as I turn up a Coltrane stream on rhapsody full of old records that the record companies played the scam game with royalties so they make the most not he, the same cds I could never find on p2p and a couple I would have bought if I could have ever found them and just giggle on what 10 bucks can buy.