Cory Doctorow, a writer, a Boing-Boing contributor and one of the most interesting thinkers on copyright, copyleft and social aspects of intellectual property, explains why music streaming services will never become an effective substitute for downloading, ending up as a complementary service instead:
(…)
Indeed, the record industry seems to have forgotten the lesson of 70 years’ worth of radio: people who hear songs they like often go on to acquire those songs for their personal collections. It’s amazing to hear record industry executives deny that this will be the case, especially given that this was the dominant sales strategy for their industry for most of a century. Collecting is easier than it has ever been: you can store more music in less space and organise it more readily than ever before.
People will go on using streaming services, of course. They may even pay for them. But people will also go on downloading. Streaming won’t decrease downloading. If streaming is successful – that is, if it succeeds in making music more important to more people – then downloading will increase too. With that increase will come a concomitant increase in Big Content’s attacks on the privacy and due process rights of internet users, which, these days, is pretty much everyone.
(…)
He also describes this unique emotional space books occupy in our lives, both private and social:
(…)
And it’s not just me. It’s social. It’s across our entire society. If you’re making a short film, and you want to illustrate a society that’s falling into tyranny, you can just cut away to a scene of a pile of books burning, and everyone will know exactly what you meant. If you want to indicate that a character in a book is very sympathetic, and you mention how much she loves reading and going to the library, then your readers will immediately show sympathy for her. Books have this penumbra of virtues, they ooze virtue, and it’s long beyond anything rational or reasonable, because all of you who are people of the book know that there are many books that are absolutely unworthy of that virtue, and yet—and yet—when I worked in a bookstore and had to strip paperbacks to send them back, it was painful to tear the covers off of books. I can barely bring myself to recycle the phone book every year.
(…)
Both articles are worth reading. Enjoy!