Celebration Day! Led Zeppelin finally going digital
Jed | October 15, 2007According to this article on C|Net News, Led Zeppelin songs are finally going to be available online for legal music purchase.
As C|Net notes, “Declining to sell music online hasn’t made Led Zeppelin’s songs unavailable; they are regularly traded on unauthorized file-sharing services.” So the real question is whether this will matter or not. Have too many years gone by without a legal option for downloading Zeppelin songs? Does everyone who wants Zeppelin music already have it?
I think it will matter, and here’s why.
In the short term, there will be a brief spike of sales people completing their collection or opting to spend money for higher quality bitrates. Then I expect sales will drop off substantially. But the real target audience is the massive numbers of soon-to-be fans. These are kids, probably younger than 13, who’ve yet to be exposed to the awesomeness that is Led Zeppelin. More and more radio stations are switching to “Jack” programming which every so often does include popular Led Zeppelin songs. This means there’s a greater chance now than before that people will hear “Stairway” or “The Lemon Song” or “Whole Lotta Love” and decide to check out this crazy British band they’ve heard about but never really listened to before.
The best way to reach these fans is to make the music easily accessible. No matter what anyone says, the reason legal music downloads work is because they’re easier than finding the music illegally. No one can argue that it’s harder for the great unwashed masses to use iTunes than bittorent.
Of course, whether they decide to use DRM is a different matter. Let’s hope they follow the trend towards DRM-free music and go with one of the DRM-less music providers like iTunes Plus or Amazon Mp3.
But overall, I say, “good on ya” to Led Zeppelin.
