The Myth Of The "Lost Sale"

Plenty of rights holders stick to the line of "one illegal install equals one lost sale" so why don't they advertise it load and proud? If that's true, then every install is one of their customers, so why not proclaim on their home page how many of their own customers they've set their lawyers on?

Why not have a total to date of all of their customers who have been shaken down for money, how many are in the process of being shaken down for money and how many chose to give in to the settlement threat letters? Why not list the various legal firms as "most loyal earners" for their efforts in "assisting these customers in the process of emptying their wallets"?

Oh, I see, the PR value from proudly proclaiming how many customers they're suing may backfire you say? Well gosh darnit you may just be onto something. I'd imagine that level of honestly wouldn't go down too well with prospective customers.

The problem is that the logic is flawed, "one illegal install does NOT equal one lost sale". Plenty of people wouldn't buy it anyway, if they could not get it illegally, they wouldn't get it at all. Value for money is an equation applied by each of us individually to something based on how much something costs, how much we have to spare and whether or not we think it's worth the asking price. Something with a £0 price tag has no downside, if we don't get much from it, we haven't lost anything, since we never spent anything. Price an item at £10 and we have to decide whether or not we'll get £10+ value from it.

Think of the newspaper "The Metro". It's distributed free of charge at train stations across the country. Since it's free plenty of commuters pick a copy up to read on their journey. If it wasn't free would they buy it? A small number would, but the vast majority wouldn't. They'd leave that part out of their commute. Plenty of people read the Metro just to pass the time, without it they'd find other ways to pass the time.

Markets set the price, not the rights holders. If you have an item that you choose to price at £100 but nobody is willing to pay £100 for it, is it worth £100? No, it's only worth what people will pay for it. If that means nobody is willing to pay your asking price for the latest reheat of yet another in a long line of factory pressed boy bands doing an album full of covers, then they are not worth the price you're asking. If people are only interested when it's free of cost, then that should also send a message of how much they're willing to pay for your product.

It's not all about cost either. Plenty of people will pay for stuff they can get free if they see value in it. Plenty of independent musicians, writers and artists are bypassing the rich corporate middlemen and going straight to their fans. Plenty of fans are perfectly happy to buy "proper" copies of their favourite books or albums because they know their money is going to reward those who created the stuff they love. Even if they get the electronic version free of charge, they still want to donate a few pounds or dollars here and there, or help publicise a new release or tour.

Those artists don't believe the myth about every install / download would be a paying one, nor do they believe in setting lawyers on their fans. They've spotted the obvious flaw in the plan, everyone is fighting for customers time and money, if someone is enjoying YOUR work, it's time they could have been spending with someone else's, and if they're enthused enough they become more determined than a paid promoter, and all at no cost. You're relationship with them through the internet helps cement and nourish that.

When you cheapen the product by adding all sorts of conditions of use, or DRM to make the paying customer jump through hoops it affects the value for money equation in people's heads. When paying customers wake up to the fact that there's better value in an illegal version of what they want because it has all the consumer hostile stuff like DRM removed that they choose that instead of paying you for it, that also should send a message.

For creative people, the worst thing is not that everyone takes your stuff and doesn't pay you, it's that nobody know about you. You can be as good as you want but nobody knows about you. So everything you can do to increase your fanbase you should be grabbing onto with both hands. Anything your "advisor's" claim you should to to reduce it, you should be rejecting. Sites like YouTube gave your fans an extra place to see your stuff, sending DMCA requests only hurts you in the long run. They are free publicity, uploaded by people who care enough about your stuff to want to share it with the world.

Imagine if you trawled sites like YouTube and Facebook and found absolutely NO mention of you, your band, album etc other than the official sites you were paying for via promoters. How would you feel? Would you feel you're just on the cusp of super stardom? No? Why not?

The other element of this is a pretty simple one; people will share your stuff anyway. There's nothing you can do about it. You can of course spend your time, money and attention suing everyone you see in the hopes that perhaps after your lawyers fleece them for several hundred or thousand pounds that they will still be your fans, and still want to do right by you and go buy your stuff in an authorised outlet. You could hope that people with common interests like fans of bands resist doing something that comes naturally, and hope that they don't talk about it. Keep in mind that you need them, you need their loyalty; they DON'T need you.

You could also hope for Superman to arrive and offer to spin the Earth backwards fast enough for long enough that time travels backwards and all this has been one bad dream. The other option is that you could roll with it, embrace the sharing culture, use it to your advantage and stop trying to fight something which will not go away.