I find it highly encouraging to see that music downloads is beginning to be a part of “accepted use policies” — not in the sense of illegal copying, but indeed a recognition that the important part is listening to the music, not building big series of cd’s.
Read this news:
Neuf Cegetel is the first Internet Service Provider in the world to offer legal music downloads. It has announced details of a six-month agreement with Universal, a French subsidiary of Universal Music. Subscribers to Neuf Cegetel’s fast internet services can now download unlimited music from one of nine Universal catalogues. For just under five euros a month, they will have access to all nine catalogues. The offer seems to undercut the iTunes music store run by Apple which has, until now, been by far the most popular and profitable legal online music source. iTunes offers singles for around one euro and albums for around nine euros. After the Neuf Cegetel announcement, France Telecom said it was in negotiations with music publishers for its Orange internet service. It hopes to offer its music service by June 2008.
Source: http://www.french-news.com/SPECIALS/news-flash/index.html.
What I am especially reminded of was our own experience when we came back from our summer vacation. We lost almost 300 cd’s, and such a download service would only have necessitated that we move an external hard disk drive which could have been connected to a media center instead.
Saving lots of space on shelves and also increasing security because it is much cheaper to rent a box in our local bank for the external hard drive than to go through all the tedious paperwork etc.
So the future looks bright for those willing to pay for good service and will look rather bad for those criminals who will no longer be able to find large music collections they can sell. Honest citizens will spare a lot of time.