Amazon to Torrent Site: Stop Letting Your Users Buy Our Music

Posted on 11. May, 2009 by refe in NEWS

news9 0 | Amazon to Torrent Site: Stop Letting Your Users Buy Our MusicFree music may not be what anyone in the Music Industry wanted, but ignoring it and hoping it will go away is the wrong response. It won’t go away – at least not until someone figures out a way to add additional value, or we witness the collapse of the Western world. Since both of those scenarios appear to remain a while off, the music industry needs to stop fearing pirates and start looking at creative ways of capitalizing on them.

Amazon.com looks to be the latest example of a major music retailer missing out on a huge opportunity to profit from file sharing – and this one was practically handed to them!

Coda.fm is a music-only torrent site featuring a few features that are somewhat unique among torrent sites. One of those features is the option to purchase albums from Amazon.com after downloading them for free on BitTorrent. The reasoning behind this is simple: download free music from Coda.fm and after you’ve had the chance to sample a bunch of different tracks you can hop on over to Amazon to buy the ones you like. According to the site’s founder “a couple hundreds of albums and digital downloads have been sold to date.”

The model’s not perfect, but any service that encourages people to purchase music from your site should be a good thing, right? Well, not everyone sees it that way, apparently. Shortly after the site’s launch Amazon.com asked them to remove any links to the online retailer from their site. They also closed their associate account, preventing them from taking any cut from purchases made through the links.

“I can’t overstate enough the idiocy of said request: they’re actually telling us to stop helping them selling albums,” said Coda.fm’s founder. TorrentFreak also puts it pretty well: “Indeed, in theory this is a win-win situation for all parties involved. Amazon, the artists, labels and the Coda founder all made extra money while the users of the site could buy off their guilt.”

So why would Amazon put the kabosh on a creative new revenue source? They haven’t officially commented on the move, but it’s no secret that the company has larger interests at stake – any profit Amazon might make through sites like Coda.fm would pale in comparison to the payout they receive from the major record labels who license their catalogues for sale on AmazonMP3.

Share it if you like it:
  • Twitter
  • StumbleUpon
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Technorati
  • email
  • LinkedIn
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Netvibes
  • MySpace
  • FriendFeed
  • Tumblr
  • Posterous

Tags: , , , , , ,

3 Responses to “Amazon to Torrent Site: Stop Letting Your Users Buy Our Music”

  1. Lance

    14. May, 2009

    I WHOLE HEARTEDLY APPLAUD THIS ACTION! It’s not short sited in the least, it’s the legal thing to do on their end. Torrents are not legal and clearly Amazon doesn’t want to be associated with or validate an illegal entity. There is no gray area here. There are plenty of legal places to hear enough of a song to get a full view of what the album sounds like to decide to buy it without getting the milk for free.

    Marketing people of course will see this as an opportunity, I see it as a pitfall, either you fight it, or you submit to it and morph with it to the outcome that it will become, and try to make that outcome a benefit. I think the outcome of what is being suggesting, could in fact be a positive one, however at what cost?

    If you start down the slippery slope of making it OK or “acceptable” on all levels, then where does that leave the owner of the intellectual property on their property that they DIDN’T want shared? Where are this persons rights as the creator and or owner?
    We have this issue with “programs”, “movies”, “artwork”, the written word, all over the internet. “Copyright infringement”, simply means that the owner of the work has the right to allow or NOT allow this to happen with their property.
    If you make it “OK” or the “accepted norm” to just offer anyones intellectual property for free to everyone, how is that going to effect their rights down the road?

    This is what you have to ask yourself, I have absolutely no problem with Torrents making available materials that have been given to them via the proper entities to market for free, these sites could even make money with advertising rather than just run at a loss doing this (which is of course what they were hoping to do with their Amazon Affiliation fee’s) They could do it on a much bigger basis if they were legit business’ rather than fly by night operations working illegally. Myspace is making a killing on advertising because they chose to embrace this concept the correct way.

  2. refe

    14. May, 2009

    I’m not trying to defend torrent sites. While their legality is still very much subject to debate, as a matter of principle I don’t think people should steal music – or anything for that matter. I think that what Coda.fm realized was that the people who download free music are a huge market for making money on music downloads. Read this article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music. Here’s an excerpt:

    “The Norwegian study looked at almost 2,000 online music users, all over the age of 15. Researchers found that those who downloaded “free” music – whether from lawful or seedy sources – were also 10 times more likely to pay for music. This would make music pirates the industry’s largest audience for digital sales.”

    This could have been an opportunity to show the viability of file-sharing as a promotional tool that is actually quite effective in encouraging higher sales of digital music.

    “Everybody knows that music sales have continued to fall in recent years, and that filesharing is usually blamed. We are made to imagine legions of internet criminals, their fingers on track-pads, downloading songs via BitTorrent and never paying for anything. One of the only bits of good news amid this doom and gloom is the steady rise in digital music sales. Millions of internet do-gooders, their fingers on track-pads, who pay for songs they like – purchasing them from Amazon or iTunes Music Store. And yet according to new research, these two groups may be the same.”

  3. Simon Adams

    15. May, 2009

    I’m making more sales of the music I produce for my band ‘Kandystand’ since I made it available everywhere for free than when I restricted who could listen to it. Free is good if you use a paid strategy alongside, which is exactly why Amazon have been so short sighted here…

    There’s a feature on my music promotio site about this very subject http://mymusicsuccess.com/feature_free.html