November 21, 2007

Q: Do you think having music available for free will make releasing some of it on a traditional album more difficult?

A: It's always hard to figure out the actual numbers on this, but I definitely get the feeling that having a more open attitude with MP3s has contributed to my ability to actually make a living. More and more, people don't like to buy things that they haven't heard first, which makes perfect sense when you think about it. This is why they have listening stations in record stores (er, I mean, when they used to have record stores). And because I depend so heavily on word of mouth marketing, it's extremely important that it's as easy as possible to hear my stuff. Again, it comes down to the extremely low cost that comes with digital content -- it's okay if only a small percentage of listeners buy, as long as the number of listeners is very high. That can only happen if you let people listen.

The market for digital music players existed in 2001 because the content for the players -- the digitally compressed music file -- was already ubiquitous. Thanks to Napster, millions of people had stuffed their hard drives with MP3s and had installed jukebox software to manage them. What was required at the time was a simple, stylish way to make all that music portable, with a seamless connection between the PC jukebox and the portable device's software. That's what the iPod-iTunes system provided. The DRM, or copy-protection, embedded in the files that eventually came to be sold through the iTunes store was a non-issue for customers because they had a ton of easily shared DRM-free MP3s that worked just fine on the iPod.

There is no big, readymade supply of content for the Kindle. It arrives in your hands naked and empty, and the only way to fill it (other than through a kludgey and largely useless process of mailing Word documents and photos to a special email address for an extra charge) is to buy fairly expensive books and subscriptions through the Amazon store.