DMGUniversal Music Group: iPod Owners are Thieves
Universal Music Group chairman/CEO Doug Morris says of MP3 players:
"These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it," UMG chairman/CEO Doug Morris says. "So it's time to get paid for it."
Yep. We're all criminals out here, Dougie. You caught us.
I'm really sick of music industry bigwigs antagonizing their customers instead of giving us what we want: cheap downloadable music without DRM. We're screaming for it. We're buying it every chance we get. But rather than get with the program and make boatloads of nearly overhead-free money, they'd rather spend money trying to scare us with lawsuits and call us thieves.
The world is already awash in freely available pirated music. You can't possibly increase the supply. But you can make digital downloads massively more appealing by offering cheap, legal, searchable, high-speed, DRM-free downloads from which you can make money. You'll keep all your existing digital customers, and gain many, many new ones. You can compete favorably with pirated music, if you just recognise that piracy is a business model.
But you just keep on suing your customers if you like.