The RIAA Is Coming Around
I’m no RIAA fanboy. I don’t know anybody who is. However, I have to say that I’m impressed with their recent tactics to stop people from downloading torrents.
For years the RIAA has been suing people who they believe have illegally downloaded music, which brought them an incredible amount of bad press.
Now we see the RIAA has finally decided to fight the battle on the battlefield rather than in the courtroom.
The RIAA has begun uploading torrents which allows them to track the IP addresses of those who download them. More importantly, these torrents are often only samples of the songs that the user is expecting.
As more and more of these torrents are proliferated across the trackers, it’s going to be increasingly frustrating to download your favorite band’s new album.
This is exactly what the RIAA wants.
One of the reasons people are flocking to torrent sites to download their music is because of how easy it is. Depending on your internet connection, you could have your favorite song downloaded in a matter of seconds.
With the introduction of these RIAA “sample” torrents, people are going to have to download their music 3-5 times before actually getting the complete song. This added frustration and time, coupled with the threat of a lawsuit, may be enough to justify paying the $.99.
Only time will tell.
What we can learn from this is that if you’re in an established market and your competition is using unconventional methods to erode your market share you cannot depend on conventional methods (i.e. lawsuits) to recover. This is true even if it has worked before.
Instead, you have to adapt your strategy, which often means beating your competition at its own game.
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