May 09
18
Its The Changing Habits Of The Consumer, Stupid
The content industry continues to be worried about P2P. But it doesn't seem to understand that its fortunes were always built on giving people what they want, not what they should have.
Billy Bragg wrote an interesting piece in the Guardian about how the music industry is trying to make the ISP's into the proxy bad guys. He says that the music industry is trying to essentially outsource the bad guy role.
That is certainly true in the UK. But I think there is a deeper issue that is going to build in intensity for all the content industry players. That is that the companies don't appear to understand or appreciate that while they have been battling against downloads, which seems like it has been going on for decades now, their audience has been changing.
I think my daughter typifies the kind of change that is taking place. She works in media and consumes a lot of media. She is given free stuff by music companies, TV Stations, movie companies… She has a dream job, if you like that sort of thing. But what she is finding is that she is now time constrained. She doesn't want to invest the time she has available to watch a movie, because it takes too long – requires too much of a time committment. So when she wants to relax she chooses TV shows as the method. They represent a snack rather than a three course meal.
When she wants to see a movie, she goes to the movies, pays for her ticket and all of that.
This is interestingly enough, exactly the kind of trends that we would expect from the research that we have been doing. We see continuing growth of ticket sales for movies, continuing growth of downloads of P2P material. These can only co-incide when you start to look at the consumers' changing habits as a driver of how media should be presented rather than as a result of P2P or some other external technological modifier.