Storage and copyrights.  There is little doubt that the current copyright system, and how copyright owners sell their poducts, is in freefall.  The reason for this is the rapid growth in storage capacity....

With this in mind, it's easy to see that the real driver behind the attack on digital media copyrights is the rapid expansion of storage space on PCs.  It is doubling faster than Moore's law.  The standard $2000 PC today sells with 120 Gb of storage space more than twice what was available on the standard PC last year at this time.   This unused space asks, no demands, to be filled.  What are people filling it with?  Music.  Movies.  Digital media.

The entertainment industries greatest fault is that it isn't finding ways to fill this unused capacity with their products.  They want to keep a system in place that slowly dribbles digital media to customers in a tightly managed way, in spite of the fact that customers demand, and can easily absorb, a firehose of digital media.  Until the entertainment industry finds a way to open the floodgates they will be the losers in this battle.  Personal leverage through the use of technology is the greatest trend of all time.  Fighting that is not just stupid, it's insane." [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

I know this holds true for me in terms of television. Ever since I first bought a ReplayTV digital video recorder, I store a lot more television than I ever did before. Even on my 60-hour unit, I usually only have about 5 hours clear at any given time because I'm recording everything I or my family might want to watch. Some of the stuff on there has been waiting months for me to watch it. Other stuff I just delete without watching when I need the room.

I could probably record enough off of basic cable to keep that 60-hour box full, but I still pay for the full digital cable package anyway. Why? Because of the broad offerings and the convenience the digital storage gives me. Granted, I can't send a show to another TV (I don't have any ReplayTV 4000s yet), but I can off-load stuff to videotape if need be or if I want to let a friend watch a show. I rarely do that, though, because I have enough storage on that box.  In fact, I'm starting to view my 30-hour ReplayTV as inferior and not "large enough." I openly salivate when I think about the 320-hour Replays.

The same would be true for music. If I could easily pull in digital music that interested me, I'd pay full price and I'd listen to a lot more of it than I do now because of the increased convenience and the ability to store all of it.

Remember that I'm "shifted," which really just means that I'm very busy and that I want to watch TV and movies when it's convenient for me. The same holds true for music - I want to listen to it when and where it's convenient for me. If you're going to wait around for me to turn on the radio at 5:08 pm in order to hear the song you want me to hear so that I'll buy that band's album, it isn't going to happen. That's why music sales are declining. Disney, Time-Warner, etc. all need to study the digital video recorder industry very closely and recognize how to meet me in my world. Then I'll start buying their products again.