Social Media

For the industry, sharing of files has become a serious problem for profits.  Having as many possible copies as you want of the same song or movie is an side-effect of digitizing certain products.  And unfortunately for the industry, this has come with certain standards.  People want to be able to have as many versions of their own Mp3s as they want, or to be able to share these things with their friends.  And that also has a function in advertising.  Companies will want people to be able to share via word-of-mouth, and places like Youtube or file sharing sites do drive up interest.  They just also make it laughably easy to never have to pay for the music the user is interested in.  So, there comes a need for a new solution to these problems.

First solution would be to make the files computer locked.  Apple already does this through their iTunes program.  To play your songs, you have to give access via your username and password, and you can only give access to five computers/accounts.  This allows for low level sharing, and also creates a prioritizing of how it's shared - you won't send the file off without thinking, because you need to make sure you have access on all your possible platforms too.  However, this does irritate customers, and cause confusion among them.  The ability to track who is using a file is limited by how the computers are labeled (or not) when the process is set up, and so a lot of times, this way ended up choosing between random computer names or IP addresses and hoping you hadn't locked yourself out of your own files.  It also doesn't prevent Youtube uploading or the like.

Second solution would be to disable sharing all together.  This would obviously be deeply upsetting to consumers, who want to share even between their own devices, which might use different accounts for a variety of reasons, and would at least initially leave a bad impression of the company.  However, it would be one of the most effective ways at completely shutting down piracy.

The third solution would be to ad advertising onto the product.  This would also be seen negatively, but it would turn the piracy into something of a positive.  Even if the song itself is shared multiple times, the 15 second ad spot in front of the advertisement would at least allow for the company to remind consumers to buy the song themselves if they can, and to like the band or production company promote themselves.