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I find it such a shame that the industry is treating law abiding people in such a disgraceful manner. As someone who buys the majority of music i listen to and only downloads very occasionally to sample the album it annoys me. I even gone as far as having to download an entire album because i couldn't get the one i bought on to my mp3 player. What kind of crap is that. The music industry is really trying to kill themselves, it is the only industry that has been so protected of itself that it has almost destroyed itself.
You can look at the industry over it last 50 years and you can see the many blunders it has made, seeing everything as a threat rather than opportunity. Here is my brief history of music time:
Records: started off okay, as far as i know not too many problems here, but then again this was only the start of getting music into peoples homes.
Radio: Shit, thought the record industry with radio coming out who the hell will buy records, we'd better keep an eye on this, it will ruin us. They were right, it nearly did, at least they took a massive drop in sales, from $104 million to $6 million in 1932 when radio started. I bet they were crapping themselves that the record industry was dead. Took 9 years before record sales increased again to previous levels. Looked like they a couple of years after the introduction of radio they realised it was the perfect marketing tool.
1960 - Stereo music, still the industry was looking good, and we welcomed the beatles to the music world.
1963 - the tape. This doesn't sound too good, well back then it was okay but we al know that it would only take a decade or two until we would all be copying music on to tape. "Tape my god, it will ruin us". Well turned out it actually didn't, it slowed sales for a while but that's a distant memory.
1982 - welcomes the CD, and the best years music has ever enjoyed, ever!!! It looked like it couldn't get any better. Everyone was replacing their records and tapes and the cd could be produced cheaply, quickly and sold with a nice premium.
While that was happing, video killed the radio star, again the music industry wasn't too happy with this lastest development. I seem to remember that their weren't to many industry leaders who were happy about mtv. Again after they imbraced they realised the power of video and TV.
But the one thing that really pissed the industry off was the internet, i'm not talking about file sharing. I'm talking about them not giving the licences to online stores (amazone, moreover i think blockbuster was the first to want to sell music through online stores). Seems a little strange but it was all something to do with not being able to charge the price premiums in the countries they were in (no cheap imports for that country). I'm sure on line cd sales account for a significant part of their revenue now.
At the same time as all of this the blessed Napster took the industry to new levels of fear. They ploughed all their resources in getting it shut down, not in developing their own i-tunes. I say i-tunes just because they were the first major major brand to enter the market place. Even they had a battle aquiring the licences and they're not even a music company. Finally the industry is playing catch up, it took them long enough to start seeing new technology for what it is for. Now there are still alot of problems like the fact an album costs as much to buy the actual cd as it does to buy the files but at least they are getting there.
Of course with drm they are spoiling the good work they are doing, as any technology no matter how much protection on it can be hacked. So why waste all that money, they would be better off spending it on technology development, new artist and better service.
We can not also forget that not only but all the major record lables have interesting in businesses that facilitate the copying/filesharing. AOL Time Warner (internet/music/computers/winamp) looks like this would be all i would need to copy music over the net, play it back to myself and probably burn it. Too much interest in making money to remember that left foot is helping to fund the right and vice versa. Once they realise we are not all out their to get something for nothing the better they will be.
We just want value and even that is being lost through DRM. So many better aways to solve this issue but again they are running scared, fearing this is the end rather than an opportunity to do something new.
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"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible." - Arthur C. Clarke
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