Well, I was meaning to... ;)

I don't think Spotify should be basing their pricing around what appeals to people who don't have much interest in music. ;)

Then you are either phenomenally cheap or your have no interest in streaming music. Neither of which apply to most of the people in this discussion.

I don't know what this "average person" is to whom you refer, but outside of Slashdot, I think most people think the notion of copyright is reasonably fair. Inside of Slashdot, you get modded down for being anti-piracy.

Well Spotify isn't available in Canada so I guess that this particular excuse doesn't apply for this poster.

€10 a month isn't an "awful lot of money" to most people. It's the price of a pizza and a beer. I'm not going to pick on people to whom it is a lot of money. But I would certainly tell people who have that money available for other things but somehow value music so low that they think this is overpriced, that their expectations are skewed. You'd probably pay around this to rent a couple of movies over a month. And this you can listen to 24/7.

Don't have to trust you - I'm another paying customer. Honestly, I pay the £10 per month to get pretty much any music I've ever heard of almost instantly available. And if you don't want the high bit-rate or mobile service, it's half that. High bit-rate is 320Kbps Ogg, standard is, from memory, 160kbps, so unless you have good speakers, you might not even care about the bit rate.

Trust Slashdot to highlight the "So long, guess I'll go back to pirating music comment". Honestly - is it really that horrifyingly out of whack to charge £5 a month for endless music? I don't think many people have the right to be outraged about someone wanting £5 a month for that. It just makes them sound stupid and / or greedy.

What are your figures for this and why do you believe that Spotify don't know something about their business model that you do? The idea that paid spotify wont pay the bills seems rather arbitrary when you consider that a digital service like Spotify can scale up or down its infrastructure and costs according to demand. Costs and demand move in quick step with each other unlike physical manufacturing where if you invest heavily at a certain productivity and demand falls, you may be stuffed.

I had to scale up a digital service recently (not music). It involved clicking some buttons on a hosting company's website, configuring a server and putting several hundred dollars on my card. In two months time, if I don't need it anymore, I'll cancel. I have cost of X per user, and profit of Y per user. So long as X

I've yet to meet a really good musician who wasn't taught their skills by other musicians. Perhaps one or two self-taught types are out there and are a success story. The rest all got taught. Often those lessons were paid for.

Well, he's experienced now.

So obvious question is how likely is it that the thieves will catch on that it's a special drive before it's too late. So long as Toshiba don't stick a great big label on it reading "Super-Secure Self-Erasing Drive", there's a good chance this drive will work as intended, isn't there?

The only people I trust less than law enforcement, are the people who do trust law enforcement.

Yep - those methods would be a lot more similar in effect to simply making a back up of your own. I think there's a good chance that it would make a difference in court. It might not get you off, but at least one of the big cases (and probably others) that gets bandied about wasn't because the woman was downloading the albums, but because she was distributing them via bit torrent. If you're just grabbing off Usenet then the damages that can be shown really are a lot less. At least in the US courts as I understand it. Naturally I'm not a lawyer ;) but this is my understanding.

No, the good is the movie / computer game / novel / recording / whatever. The licence is a means of getting payment for that good. It's only artificial scarcity if that movie or other content just somehow popped into existence for everyone to come and get if it weren't for someone artificially constraining them. But the content didn't just pop into existence. It was produced at a cost.

Everything else follows from you focusing on cost of reproduction, rather than cost of production.

Ah, no, I was expressing my surprise because you weren't saying it was good and noble. I'm just tired of people on Slashdot arguing about how it is virtually a moral act to pirate a movie or song because the company is stealing from culture or something. Your position is more honest and slightly refreshing, imo.

Well keep in mind that those markets are subsidised by our own. You can be certain that sales of DVDs in China didn't pay for the Lord of the Rings trilogy alone! If prices in countries where copyright is more respected fell in line with countries where it's widely disregarded, that would be a major dink in the profitability of movies, computer games, ebooks, et al.