David Emery OnlineHonesty is the best policy
17 August 2006
At work this week we received an email from someone that had just purchased the new Thom Yorke cd from our online store. No strange thing – we receive quite a few feedback email from our stores, but the contents of it really bowled us for six:
“Hi there. I’m a big fan of Thom Yorke so I’ve already downloaded the album – don’t bother sending me the cd. Thanks.”
The guy went to the record labels store, bought and paid for the cd and then kindly asked us not to send it.
This pretty much directly ties in to what Jason Calcanis of AOL has been writing about – if you pre-order a cd, does that give you the right to download it? After all, you’ve already paid for it.
It’s a tricky point – I’d be inclined to say yes, there’s no problem with that (it’s mostly just a form of format shifting) but it really makes you think about what you’re actually paying your money for – is it the music, or is it the actual physical disk and packaging (as well as the music). If it’s the former, then downloading it before hand doesn’t seem to present a problem. If it’s the latter, though then I think you may well be devaluing the physical product – following that logic you should be paying for the download as well as the cd.
That’s certainly what most record labels seem to think, but I’m sure it’s not what the majority of customers think. Consequently, I imagine we going to see smaller labels start to offer free downloads when you preorder fairly soon – it’s the only way they have a chance to keep people of the file sharing networks.