The “I Bought A Song” Registry
Oh how I wish someone made a registry that for a small fee, would accept real CDs, DVDs, or Blu-Rays, Amazon and iTunes accounts, or whatever, and would register that a particular person had purchased a particular piece of content. In exchange, the service would guarantee that when new formats came out they could download that song or movie or even, ick, cut new physical media.
Imagine that all the content providers loved this idea and would immediately allow people to buy their music or movies through the registry and not have to deal with physical distribution and format wars themselves. Imagine further that these providers could provide the best possible masters to the registry and make a little money no matter how the user decided to use their media.
Imagine they could come up with a way for families to share their music amongst themselves for less than the cost of buying all the music and movies again.
I sit here thinking about what it would mean to send every CD and DVD in the house off, and turn over the keys to my online download accounts in exchange for a shiny new download service that works with everything I have. I even imagine that DirecTV gets in on the deal and updates their software so I can download my own content to my receivers through the satellite and distribute it to my local computers, iPods, and media centers instead of killing my puny Internet connection. I imagine that Netflix figures out how to make rentals appear on this service in some way that's temporary.
It will never happen of course. Everyone seems to think they'll lose something in this kind of arrangement. But sometimes it's fun to dream about what would be best for the consumer. In fact, I think it's the way out of the rental mess for Netflix, but I doubt they like the idea either.
Instead we are forced to play in walled gardens and buy our music and movies again every time something new comes out. Heck, I have DVD and Blu-Ray versions of a lot of different movies at this point. What a waste!
Josh Poulson
Posted Monday, May 31 2010 12:07 PM
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