This sounds wacky, but imagine if the porn industry had taken the same tack as the music companies toward online file sharing, bittorrent, usenet, etc. The music industry's only idea is to sue, which doesn't stop copying, and costs you and your artists a fortune. (Ask Apple how much money there is to be made with cheap music — billions!) Instead, the porn industry has always been on the cutting edge of web tech, adopting and assimilating everything.
-zridling
True. But... I wonder if that comparison holds all the way down though. Ahem.
One would of course have to consider porn as a specific depicted
content (a certain type of music/video, having a particular signified and referent), rather than a specific medium-form-code (and the pornography categorization is of course conditioned by the socio-cultural context). So a better comparison to start with would be : pornographic music industry (never heard a piece…) —> children song music industry. Otherwise the logic would a bit… skewed.
In other words, to be fairer, you'd have to compare "pornographic videos" too some
other kind of videos and ask at least two questions : why do “pornographic music" (or… sonic porn?) succeeds where other types of "musics" fail ? Or, more likely, why do " pornographic video " succeeds where other types of video content... fail ? Which marketing strategies are transferable to other types of music/videos,… Considering the specific psychophysical, psychosexual, socio-cultural, etc. arousing mechanisms inherent to the experience of pornography. (Sorry, this is bad English… am doing my best while I’m eating my sandwich — hey, because of you Darwin, everything I say now sounds like crude puns)
Anyway, in yet other words, there are some lessons to be learned from the porn industry, maybe, but one also has to take into account the specific experience of interpreting pornographic content, which powerfully takes advantage of certain structures and tendencies of man's biology and psychology... to put it simplistically.
I have no idea if I was able to convey my “ideas” here… Don’t worry, I won’t quote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn now. Back to my sandwich.