In case you missed it, a YouTube viral video made the rounds this week with more than 13 million people worldwide viewing it. The JK Wedding Entrance Dance was done by a couple, Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz at their wedding in a small Saint Paul church in Minnesota.
The clip featured the bride and groom's seven bridesmaids, five groomsmen and four ushers dancing to Chris Brown's, Forever.
Nielsen SoundScan, an information system that tracks sales of music and music video products throughout the United States and Canada, says that digital sales of "Forever" jumped from 3,000 to 50,000 a week when the video was posted.
What this highlights is what many of us in the tech industry have known for years. Fair use of copyrighted material actually leads to higher sales. This argument goes all the way back to the Napster days when the recording industry was fighting tooth and nail to have file sharing services shut down as the free distribution of their music was hurting sales. There were many studies and investigations done that revealed a correlation between illegal music downloading and the increase sales of singles. Napster was helping the music industry!
How can this be so? Well it's very simple. Napster had a unique system in place where if you downloaded a song it would then recommend artists to you from other users that you may like. It was kind of like a "try before you buy" system where you could listen to the alternative artist.
Other examples of stupidity by the music and movie industry are far and wide, such as NBC's decision to pull all Saturday Night Live sketches from YouTube even though its ratings had been the highest they'd been in years. This was contributed to a very funny sketch called "Lazy Sunday" that was viewed by millions on YouTube around the world who then tuned into Saturday Night Live the following week.
I've always had the opinion that media consumers can be classified into three succinct categories:
1. Those who always buy DVD's, albums etc. These people are media lovers and collectors who genuinely love consuming music and video.
2. Those who buy some media and will "pirate" other media. This group of people like to support the music and movie industry, but don't want to spend a fortune in the process.
3. Those who never buy anything and will always "pirate" everything. This group is a lost cause.
What I'm trying to get at is the music and movie industry should not be including the third group in lost sales. Why? Because this group was never going to buy the media in the first place so no actual sale would have been lost. This is nothing new, it's been happening for years.
The music and movie industry needs to target the second group and figure out why it is they are downloading some media while paying for some of it. Well the answer is very simple. It all comes down to a few factors; cost, availability and opportunity. Offer the media at a lower cost and in a variety of formats otherwise you won't get the sale at all, simple.
What do you think? Leave a comment!
