I’m posting on an off day because I just read this post on the Techdirt blog, which reminded me of a topic I wanted to riff on a while ago.

I will never understand why software companies, as well as the music industry, choose to focus so much on piracy. In college I took a marketing class, and if I had to summarize the entire class to a single learning experience, it would be that it’s ten times more expensive to focus on gaining new customers than it is to simply focus on existing customers. the focus on existing customers part is the point to emphasize here. Ironically the university where I took this class does not practice this principle at all.

And neither do the majority of software companies or music companies. The readers of this blog are all too familiar with the ridiculous hoops we all have to jump through to authorize our DAW software, and the plugins that go with it.

The ridiculous iLok key, the convoluted authorizing process that seems to change with every software vendor and software upgrade, and the constant process of having to prove, wait, and re-prove that you did in fact pay $1000 for this piece of software.

Why does this stupid authorizing process even exist? In this context there are two types of customers. A) people who run legitimate business and want to own the proper equipment they need to do so, and B) people who steal things and will always steal things regardless of whether there are methods to prevent piracy or not. Hey software companies, you’re not hurting the crooks, you’re hurting us, your loyal customers!

Why do the customers who are loyal-the people who keep the software makers in business by supporting them-get penalized for doing so? These companies should be rewarding us by giving us price breaks, along with free upgrades for repeat purchases.

See you tomorrow.

Here are some blogs/articles I have stumbled across over the past couple of weeks. I subscribed up to these blogs, and I suggest you do to. It’s priceless information written by some of the best music business thinkers/marketers.

[http://sivers.org] Derek Sivers’ blog, the founder of CD Baby

[http://newmusicstrategies.com/?p=508] Came across this from a link on Derek Sivers’ blog. The article is written by Andrew Dubber as a post on his blog. Great perpective on piracy vs. sharing, and how it really fits into our industry.

[www.openp2p.com/lpt/a/3015] Another great article about piracy that Derek Sivers linked to on his blog. This one is written by Tim O’Reilly.

[www.musicthinktank.com/blog] A great new music business blog that has multiple authors all sharing very thought provoking ideas, and building a community around those thoughts. Authors include: Andrew Dubber, Derek Sivers, Bob Baker, Ariel Hyatt and plenty of others.

[www.futureofmusicbook.com] I googed Paul McGuiness because I wanted to read the speach he made at Cannes. I ended up at Dave Kusek’s blog. He and Gerd Leonhard co-wrote the book [The Future Of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution] Oh yeah, and he posted a [full transcript] of the Paul McGuiness speech.