Music and movie purchasing services, like iTunes, allow users to easily and relatively cheaply purchase media over the cloud to view on their computers and mobile devices. Many have said that iTunes would spell the end to illegal downloads, however the problem is still rife — especially among younger populations.
The question is, why? With applications like iTunes and Amazon Music, one can purchase music at the click of a button and both also offer DRM free music now: so it can’t be ease of use that is causing the problem. Also, at just under (or over, in some cases) $1 per track, it can’t be price that is causing the problem either. Therefore, there is another hidden cause — which I believe is status.
Go into any school or educational establishment and you immediately find cliques or certain groups of pupils that ‘stick together’ — ‘friendship groups’, if you will. Of course, within any group there are hierarchical establishments, and I believe that this is why people still illegally download. It’s not that it’s too difficult to download music legally, it’s not that it’s too expensive; it’s that people are concerned about their image (Granted, this may not be the whole problem, some individuals just have an irrational hate of the record industry.)
I propose a system whereby the user is visually rewarded for downloading music legally, through badges and suchlike. ‘Badges’ and other rewards seemed to gain notoriety after the launch of such services as Foursquare and Gowalla. Let’s just think about what these services are: people are openly displaying their whereabouts to other people to, in essence, show off — and human beings like to show off. Without this reward system, would these services have such a large user base? Probably not. (For example, I know a website called Fast Society — it is similar to Foursquare is many ways but it doesn’t display your location to strangers, only to people you specify, and there is no reward system. Although only a start-up business, this service hasn’t taken off.)
So, there should be a badge system when downloading media — for example, on the day of a specific album release, if you download that album you get a limited edition first day badge. This could be used in conjunction with a simple follower system — allowing the individual to compare badges and again providing another example to ‘show off’ thereby boosting the users’ egos.
This could be easily integrated into iTunes: the user would say whether they want to create a media profile with their existing iTunes account, then using another domain the user would be able to choose a username etc. The profile would be linked with Twitter & Facebook allowing purchases to be easily shared across multiple profiles on the web.
Along with the badge system, ‘physical’ rewards should be given as well. I’ve been using a site called Go Miso recently which is essentially Foursquare for TV Shows and Movies — i.e. You check in whenever you’re watching something. Revision3 was a pioneer of the service and offered rewards for Tekzilla viewers. This should be the same with media purchases — if you purchase many songs from an artist then you should get discounts on any other songs you download from them. The iTunes “Genius” system would also work here — to encourage users to buy more tracks and to buy tracks from different artists (thus keeping record companies happy), free songs from similar artists which may appeal to the users’ tastes would be offered. A similar system would be used for movies — buy more movies, get more discounts.
So, that’s how to stop illegal downloaders. Sure, there will still be some who choose to download illegally for financial or other personal reasons — but the large population who choose to download illegally for no reason at all, would be swayed by rewards. However, for illegal software downloads, it is more difficult to prevent. Most people download software illegally just to try it out, like Photoshop for example. I believe that companies need to offer more flexible free ‘trials’ and reduce their prices overall — no budding teenage artist is going to spend money to purchase Photoshop as it is so expensive. This leads to piracy and a crackdown on creativity.
Reward, Reduce and Rethink.
