Crip Talk: As Crips Slide By

In a paper published on SSRN, The Magnificence of the Disaster: Reconstructing the Sony BMG Rootkit Incident, Deirdre Mulligan and Aaron Perzanowski analyze the remarkable blunder made by Sony BMG in a futile attempt to protect its music assets by choosing to install software on user computers that was potentially damaging.  While there conclusions are not revolutionary nor come as a surprise to analysts and groups who has spent a great deal of time looking at DRM, their paper does represent one of the first scientific analysis of the incident and its ramifications within the music industry.  Not only that, however, this paper begins to point out the utter disaster that the incident represented for the industry as a whole.

Consumer attempts to let the industry no about DRM and its consequences to music sales had gone entirely unheated by the music industry in the past.  The Sony BMG incident that only provided the means for the consumer to speak out against DRM in an organized fashion, but the fallout from the incident also provided Sony BMG, its partners, and its competitors the first large-scale opportunity to gather data on how their efforts were being perceived by American consumers.  The efforts of the RIAA and courts as well as in various legislatures to limit distribution of their music have done nothing but hindered the music industry from looking at different distribution models.  However after many years of stonewalling, the music industry has begun to look at distribution models that provide more freedom to consumers.

The conclusions reached by the authors of this report provide us with a glimpse of the company — and indeed an industry — that was plagued by antiquated business models, a failure to perceive technological developments, and utterly unreasonable mindsets that led to strategies that went awry despite the enormous defeats seen in continuous uptakes of peer-to-peer music sharing.  Various efforts such as Amazon music lead us to believe that the industry is now willing to make compromises or look at different distribution models demand by consumers for the sale of their music.  While the newer business models do not provide the industry the perfect avenue for control over the music that is sold, they do enable consumers to obtain music legally. 

Trust is often a two-way street.  Sony BMG learned that the hard way.  When consumers believe that they will be trusted with the music that they are given, it is more than likely that the peer-to-peer music sharing will lesson a great deal. That is not to say, the peer-to-peer music sharing will end anytime soon.  However the success of efforts such as iTunes and Amazon will tell a great deal to the industry that the change is not always a bad thing.  Now only if the movie industry would learn the same!