Media, services, ownership. Pt 1.

Has been widely accepted for the last 10 years or so that the rise of digital streaming more or less killed piracy. And we can mostly agree on that. Ease of access to content was the reason why people (myself included, of course) pirated music and movies/shows since the late '80s.

Apple and its "song for a dollar" model changed the way people purchased music. But ultimately, what we got was just a bunch of 1s and 0s — and a contract.

And that contract is actually the most important part of the transaction. We didn’t purchase media; we acquired rights to consume content. And there’s a huge difference between the two.

We never owned the content. Those rights belong to the record labels, sometimes to the musicians, to the Movie Studios, etc.

But the media... THAT was ours to keep.

We were able to carry our media around. CD's, DVD's, vinyls -not so much at my times, but you get the idea), and share them with friends. As long as you had the right PLAYER for the particular MEDIA you had access to it. But now, that's not the reality anymore. Now, the media is ether.

And that makes us rely entirely on the ability to have a bridge to the content keepers. If you have an Spotify account, you still need internet connection. if you have connection, you still NEED to pay, month by month, to those gate keepers, to hold the MEDIA "for" you and serve you the content.

The convenience of ALL CONTENT YOU CAN CONSUME! at the price of media ownership. And we completely bought it.

And to be honest, at the beginning, it wasn't so bad!, I mean, The pirating thing was just better in terms of price at that point.

But in term of convenience, it wasn't that great tho. In early 2000's, There was no way of taking your music around if you didn't had a portable CD player And you would probably take 1 or 2 records and hit the street with those 2 for the day.

The iPod changed the game. High quality, well thought, you can call it even sexy. As Jobs said on stage: "A 1000 songs in your pocket!". That was just huge! And it put the first nail on the end of physical media. Now, having to carry individual pieces of media for your content consumption was an inconvenience. And since at the end, the reality was "I sell you a CD, and then you will rip the CD, and turn it into digital files for your mp3 player..." people started to just copy those digital files from friends.... Buy the media once, reproduce it as many times as you want!. No extra costs, no extra hustle. Pirating heaven.

Internet just turn this concept knob to 1000... Why would you have to know someone to get the files?. Just find someone on the internet that already got it, and "ask" them to share it with you... and that's how Napster and other p2p file sharing software and services were born. And the gates where open. It didn't matter how many times Metallica tries to sue p2p users, at the end of the day there will be always other person ripping content and share it. The MEDIA business was on a path to extinction.

But the pirate landscape wasn't all that great neither. Viruses, bad quality, low internet speeds... you name it. It was free. but not great.

iTunes, Spotify, Netflix. They solve a real problem. Getting digital content was just awfull. The convenience thing was sorted. The physical media inconvenience wasn't a problem anymore. But, what if we can make the content simply "flow" to your player wirelessly?

And now it's time to make a distinction between two things. Digital Content and Digital Media.

An mp3 player on itself, is digital media. Storage. you can store, copy, move your files from and to your computer. The FILE on itself was yours to keep. You can backup it or turn it into other type of physical media if needed.

But streaming. It changed the game. If your ability to MANAGE the digital content is severed, then you are not longer able to pirate it. You CAN'T share it, nor store it. Finally, all what's left from the early days was the less interesting part. Do you remember? The contract. Now, you only can CONSUME.

The CONTENT itself, that was never yours, is even LESS yours noways. You can consume it, as long as you accept the ways the media owners want you to do it. You can get it, as long as you pay to whoever owns the distribution rights at the time,

And right holder changes from time to time. You already experience it more than you think. Every time a movie is retired from your streaming platform catalog, its because of the distribution rights have changed. The "X is leaving the platform on 1st. of January, See it before it leaves!" thing on Netflix, is just a desperate way of squeeze revenue from that content just a little bit more before distribution rights expires and that piece of content is no longer available to you.

And now, the one company you paid so you can get the latest Taylor Swift album, can't have it anymore. Time to pay yet another streaming service to get it.

Bad luck for you, I guess.