Comments for Towards an ethical music downloading?

Johan Reubens
I do not totally agree with Charlotte in her last paragraph. There are some searching costs involved as soon as you decide to donate to charity. I myself do not know at all where to begin with: which organization to donate to, to which amount. Moreover, while Greenpeace is pissing me off grabbing me on the street to donate while…
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I do not totally agree with Charlotte in her last paragraph. There are some searching costs involved as soon as you decide to donate to charity. I myself do not know at all where to begin with: which organization to donate to, to which amount. Moreover, while Greenpeace is pissing me off grabbing me on the street to donate while you do not get a clue where you money goes to. Here, you have three major advantages: first, you get a product in exchange, secondly: you know where your money goes to; thirdly, your searching costs decrease.
However, I have some doubts about the viability of their business model. Like most of you said, there are some major competitors who offer music for free. So I believe that their target should be the “ethically music downloaders”. I wonder what the size of the target is. But keep on going, let us hope for them that downloaders will get more conscious in the following years.
Moreover, one of the major advantages is that the artist is actually retributed for his work. They should find some artists to support their cause to try and divert some of the free downloaders to their site. I think that could be a great marketing point.

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Meng Li
For me, it is dubious either paying for a good cause will be the solution for combating piracy of illegal downloading. Charity bundled with cheaper music pool sounds like a good plan; but for the downloaders, cheaper downloading is the real incentive for "going legal". To start, the idea of "part of the money goes toward charity" itself is not…
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For me, it is dubious either paying for a good cause will be the solution for combating piracy of illegal downloading. Charity bundled with cheaper music pool sounds like a good plan; but for the downloaders, cheaper downloading is the real incentive for “going legal”.

To start, the idea of “part of the money goes toward charity” itself is not something innovative. This idea is widely used by the clothing campaign, cookie sales, flower shops, etc. There are simply more than enough options for people to donnate for the good cause. It is unclear if the same tactic will work its magic this time.

In addition, as the others have stated, there is a problem to ensure that either the money collected actually goes toward where it meant to go.

Thus, the real (maybe the one and only) incentive for this website to work is to offer cheaper music pool with wider availability of music at bundled price. Also,collaboration with larger downloading device providers such as Apple (on the iphone and ipad), or setting up a feature at reduced price on major networks (iTune) may also do the trick.

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Victor Mitra
Good initiative. More money can be earned by allowing advertisers to attach their own artwork to each and every song. I must mention here that artwork thumbnails, attached to every song can be a very effective way to advertise, given the fact that they get displayed prominently on ipods, mp3 players, PC music players etc. I must…
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Good initiative. More money can be earned by allowing advertisers to attach their own artwork to each and every song. I must mention here that artwork thumbnails, attached to every song can be a very effective way to advertise, given the fact that they get displayed prominently on ipods, mp3 players, PC music players etc.
I must confess that I did not know about this site. With more than 8.5 million songs and the prospect that at least 4% of our money goes to charity, I think this site must be around the top of our recommendation lists.

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Saagar Sinha
I think the 2 issues are unrelated. I agree that I'd be more tempted to buy a track or an album if I knew the money was going to someone who needed it rather than to some rich record company or artist hoping to earn enough to buy a third mansion. However, I'd still prefer a website that can provide…
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I think the 2 issues are unrelated. I agree that I’d be more tempted to buy a track or an album if I knew the money was going to someone who needed it rather than to some rich record company or artist hoping to earn enough to buy a third mansion. However, I’d still prefer a website that can provide legal music for a nominal amount or better still, free of cost. How the site chooses to spend the money is only indirectly related to the decision. For example, I’d prefer a website which charges nominal amounts and keeps the profits to one that charges a premium to help eradicate malnutrition in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Charlotte Chaidron
I think that the creation of this implementation is a good initiative. This kind of innovation which is related to charity is always appreciated by consumers and supported by associations. Moreover, it is a good way to tackle illegal downloads because people are sensitive and feel good when they have acted in a good way for social causes. But…
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I think that the creation of this implementation is a good initiative. This kind of innovation which is related to charity is always appreciated by consumers and supported by associations. Moreover, it is a good way to tackle illegal downloads because people are sensitive and feel good when they have acted in a good way for social causes.
But I agree with Charles, uncertainty remains. We cannot be certain how this platform is really working. Indeed, the creators must have a personal interest in creating it, they firstly have to ensure revenues and success. And this success is guaranteed because of the advertising in promoting this platform: in using it, we are not only fighting against illegal downloads, but also we support causes. In this way, it is really easy to attract consumers.
I’m not personally convinced by the benefit of this platform. How can we be sure that our money is actually going in favor of charities? I think that the main difficulty the creator will have to deal with is the faith of the consumers. I assume that lot of people will think in this way: those creators are really smart innovators, but if i want to contribute in social causes in investing in charity, i would prefer to do it by myself and I do not want to take the risk and pass by people whose main objective is to make their business profitable.

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Bakanaite Ruta
Such kind of initiatives which seeks to make influence on people conscience always makes good impression for the society – charities, sponsorships and etc. because it is concerned to increase welfare. As a consumer I also support such kind of activities and I think that there is a need to implement more of them and not even for downloading music…
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Such kind of initiatives which seeks to make influence on people conscience always makes good impression for the society – charities, sponsorships and etc. because it is concerned to increase welfare. As a consumer I also support such kind of activities and I think that there is a need to implement more of them and not even for downloading music via internet. Yet the most important question I always raise – how to bee assured that financial resources that were collected for charity purposes reached its final destination? The fact that we are living in the world where exist such kind of things like corruption, money laundering and so on which do not complement our view at all. Due to that, I believe that to trust only on claims about the charity initiatives doesn’t assure the implementation of process for this reason we have to see the proof which is usually missing…

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Charles Marsily
The idea of the fairsharemusic.com platform is great, but whether success will be achieved remains uncertain. The biggest advantage of the platform is obviously to offer a new incentive for end-user to pay to listen legally music. Hence a new opportunity to get money back into the music industry. And maybe such incentive will help recess piracy as the new platform…
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The idea of the fairsharemusic.com platform is great, but whether success will be achieved remains uncertain.

The biggest advantage of the platform is obviously to offer a new incentive for end-user to pay to listen legally music. Hence a new opportunity to get money back into the music industry. And maybe such incentive will help recess piracy as the new platform has strong premises: every single buck redirected to a good cause is worthy, and might help other people.

However this platform is not without weaknesses… I see mainly two of them which are explained hereafter:

(1) It is a new downloading platform to get used to, aside to the more commonly accepted Amazon and iTunes ecosystems. If the buying experience is not at least the same as other legal alternatives, I don’t think the “charity” part will be enough to attract new end-users (even more if they are strong illegal downloaders). And for now the track portfolio of fairsharemusic.com is smaller and less accessible than its alternatives.

A successful platform such as iTunes offering a “charity” system might have more incentive power than fairsharemusic.com. And even proposing such system for a short period of time might turn newcomers into the legal downloading era, the point also being to educate people. It won’t be the first time we will see Apple participating to a charity initiative (cf. the iPod Nano Red).

(2) Donating directly to foundations such as the British Red Cross or Amnesty International might be more beneficial to the end-user for tax-deduction reasons.

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Ceylan Özcetin
We can observe that the willingness to pay and the demans for legal downloads has increased in the last years. In the same way, the profits of websites for legal downloading increased. A lot of people have understand how unethical and irresponsable illegal downloading is and that there are existing affordable alternatives to this. Consumers have the opportunity to buy for…
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We can observe that the willingness to pay and the demans for legal downloads has increased in the last years. In the same way, the profits of websites for legal downloading increased. A lot of people have understand how unethical and irresponsable illegal downloading is and that there are existing affordable alternatives to this.
Consumers have the opportunity to buy for example only one mp3 they like, instead of the whole album and the most consumers can afford a music album for about 5-6 euros AND give 50% of it to a charity organisation, which is of course a great feeling of happiness and satisfaction. Except of this the downloading site makes advertising for the charity organistions and is an attractive chain of distribution for the music industry as an alternative solution to iTunes.

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L Smith
From a corporate social responsibility point of view, this website is effective. It makes me feel guilty about downloading elsewhere and thus succeeds as an effective marketing strategy. However, when I went through the processes to purchase an album, only 3.75% of the total cost was going towards a charity. On top of this, the cost was not significantly lower…
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From a corporate social responsibility point of view, this website is effective. It makes me feel guilty about downloading elsewhere and thus succeeds as an effective marketing strategy. However, when I went through the processes to purchase an album, only 3.75% of the total cost was going towards a charity. On top of this, the cost was not significantly lower than what I would pay in a music store or at the iTunes store.

Personally, I would be more likely to use Spotify or Deezer where you can listen to music for free. As Tung Le Van Thanh said earlier “it is not illegal because they pay the royalties with ads on their website or between 2 songs”. I would not mind listening to short adds (like on the radio) as “payment” for downloading and creating my own playlist.

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