Piracy or No Piracy - Its your choice

Yesterday I visited Crosswords – wanted to buy the album Indian Ocean's Kandisa….but oh ! It was priced too high – a lofty 360 bucks for one CD, versus I could get the songs for free – thanks to Piracy.
I could not really make up my mind to spend 360 bucks for just being right. So I bought my next favorite “Ali Zafar - Huqa Paani” which was priced at 150.

This is what is called Incentive Caused Bias. Even though I know that I am doing something wrong by playing pirated songs, 360 bucks is too high an incentive for me to take the wrong path. If the incentive were lower (say 150 bucks), I would have gone for the original one.

And this is where pricing comes into play. This reminds me of the price (P) vs. volume (V) chart, I studied in the economics class. It says volume decreases when price increases. In order to increase the volume, you got to reduce the price. The final objective is to find an optimum price point, which maximizes the revenue (P*V).
(I wish the highly qualified members of Indian Ocean had taken some classes in Economics too :-)

I am not saying that efficient pricing can completely solve the piracy problem – see the incentive here – If you go for original, you get 10 songs in 150 bucks and pirated, you get 150 songs in a 10 bucks CD. And there is nothing extra you are getting in that 150 bucks CD –
Even the quality in downloaded songs matches the original ones these days.
So how low can the original CDs be priced?

But then why a person like me, who has easy access to the free downloaded music, would choose to go for the original CDs.
The idea of buying original CD first struck me when a colleague of mine, who incidentally is a close relative of Indian Ocean’s Rahul Ram, narrated the ‘Indian Ocean’ story. The portion relevant here is - These people left their promising careers (Rahul Ram is PhD in Environmental Toxicology from Cornell University) to form their band. Though they are doing quite well now, lots of struggle came their way earlier. Despite of their songs being popular, they were not making enough to sustain themselves. Because we don’t pay for music.

Here I recall another incident I read long back in some magazine. It goes something like this (in the writer’s words) - “I was traveling by train and reading a Bengali magazine. A copassenger asked me what I am reading and said he would also like to read the same. I was finished reading, so I offered him the magazine. But he said he would buy his own copy and read. When I asked him the reason, he said, if we wont support our literature, how will it sustain”

Now I am not saying that we have to go to this extent, nor I am a part of any anti piracy camp. I also play MP3s with songs, which I get for free. Still I realize that we should support our favorite artists…

The first thing an artist wants is the fame and the love of the people, but then he needs to earn also…..