Yes, they’ve dipped here and there, and music companies have been quick to blame piracy on falling CD sales. But actual CD sales still outnumber legal digital music purchases by a massive amount, whether through iTunes, eMusic, Rhapsody, Yahoo Music or other music download services.

People clearly still like to buy physical music, and as Bill Gates said (words to the effect of) late last year, buying music on CD and ripping it is still the easiest way to deal with your music collection.

Of course, that’s only the case with CDs that haven’t been subject to rootkits or other DRM protection schemes to stop you from making a morally right backup copy of your music to listen to on your mp3 player or on another device in your home. After all, you’ve paid for it once. If it’s you using the music you paid for on different devices in your home, car or office, why should you have to pay for it multiple times?

Laws in different countries often make even a simple backup of music an illegal act. But with DVDs came a specific protection mechanism called CSS. This was a protection system to stop users from making a similar morally right backup copy of their DVD movie, shipped as it was on the incredibly fragile medium of a scratch-friendly DVD disc.

Once the DECSS system became available, people were free to (illegally) make backup copies of their movies, or play them on their Linux computers, for which no legal DVD player software existed at the time.

Music piracy, followed by TV show and movie piracy, kicked off massive efforts by their respective US associations to make life for pirates as difficult as possible. Of course, several years later, piracy is as rampant as ever, with music companies now actively considering selling more music in unencumbered mp3 format.

After all, selling mp3s is one way to crack the iPod market, as unencumbered mp3s play perfectly well on the iPod, after all, and Apple is not being friendly in licensing its own format to anyone. The same is true of Windows devices, such as Microsoft's Zune with its own DRM, or Microsoft's other DRM known as PlaysForSure.

Zune and all the PlaysForSure devices from Creative, Samsung and everyone else all play mp3s without problems, too. Could the music companies just sell direct in mp3 to anyone with any brand of mp3 player? Yes, of course they can! Negotiations with Apple, Microsoft and other companies suddenly becomes much less important.

What all of the media companies have yet to figure out is volume sales. If something is priced cheaply enough, it will sell legitimately in the squintillions. Making a profit from millions, tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of sales to consumers happy to pay a reasonable price is a far better outcome than selling one million copies at a high price, making a smaller profit and turning tens of millions to piracy.

Of course piracy is wrong, and content owners should be paid for their work. But unless the world figures out a way of making content very affordable, piracy will undoubtedly continue.

Those media companies have become greedy. It’s better to have 1% from 100 people, than 100% from one person. There has to be a balance between fair and attractive pricing, while multiplying the profit by millions and millions of sales worldwide, and making more money than ever. Especially when duplication costs after the initial production cost is so low.

The world will be figuring this out for some time to come. But if music companies are finally seeing the light in regard to selling unencumbered mp3s, there’s hope that the movie industry will figure this out, too... one day. Then there’ll be no need for Muslix64 to hack anything. But until then, the Muslix64’s of the world will keep on working to render copy protection schemes meaningless.
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