Pay for free lunch

Who could resist that kind of temptation? (If you adopt a purely cultural point of view, the availability of such a mammoth treasure-trove of music, of every imaginable genre, is like erecting millions of public libraries all across the country, removing a gigantic barrier for music appreciation, especially to those with little financial wherewithal.)

By the mid-2000s, most of the stores selling these discs were gone - the result of sporadic crackdowns and, more importantly, an even more efficient and "altruistic" way of illegal distribution. Music lovers tend to share what they like, and when they upload a song and an album to the Internet, it becomes available for anyone with a connection - and connections are getting faster by the day.

Now, music is not dead. It is alive and well. First of all, music, as conveyed on a compact disc, is going down the road of vinyl - as a niche product for a handful of collectors. I've seen people giving out elaborately packaged music discs and the recipients throw them into the trash can without evening opening them. They may put an equally expensive book on the bookshelf - not to read, but to decorate.

Music as ring tones enjoyed a brief moment of glory. It was reported that China Mobile alone rakes in some 30 billion yuan ($4.78 billion) a year from this business. The question is, how much of that is given to record companies and whether that's enough to sustain the future production of music? In China, the distribution platform usually controls all the power, essentially turning the production arm into slaves.

Some of the websites that offer free music pay a license fee to record labels. Sure, they sell ads on downloading pages, but music is used chiefly as an enticement for cyber surfers. It is this area that Gao Xiaosong was ecstatic about.

But is his optimism justified?

The reason people pay for certain things and not others is mostly conditioned by years of custom. Telecommunication companies charge for everything. They used to charge even for incoming calls. So, to sell a ring tone for a yuan or two is deemed acceptable. But websites have always offered free services. When they tried to upgrade users from free e-mail boxes to paid ones, most stayed away or migrated to other free sites.

It is hard, if not entirely impossible, for people to graduate from free to pay. Companies hand out lavish brochures and pamphlets to promote their merchandise. A sales brochure for a car or a house probably costs 10 yuan apiece, but nobody would dream of selling them. It's considered a necessary cost, which will be earned back thousands of times over when the car or house is sold. In a sense, recorded music, either streamed or on a disc, has morphed into the sales material.

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