I though I would take a break and post something else that really gets me.
We all know that piracy has ended up as a monumental PR mess for the record industry, and it is a undisputed fact that the industry in general were far too late and couldn’t adopt the same model they do in the shops so invented DRM (lets not go any further into this)
I love music as much as the next man, but when a consumer thinks their being ripped of they will always find a new way, the internet provides such a way. So when Napster and Kazaa came along the consumers went there instead of going to the local music store, by the time the industry realised just how big this was they had only one option left to sue everything and everybody related to this P2P software. As a resulting pissing off there next generation customers and the ones they already had, and along the way giving themselves and P2P developers bad press.
As a knock on affect we see the labels only investing time and money and bands that they know will make money (yes the popular rubbish, usually based of Pachelbel’s canon somewhere along the line)
I acknowledge the fact piracy is theft and I just think its too late for some people who are so used to just downloading music that its unlikely that even the Dell Marketing budget could change there minds. I also think DRM just locks you in the path of why buy it and have it locked down when I can download it for nothing.
As much as the labels may not be ripping us consumers off as much as we think, why do they need to get royalties from every iPod sold, this is greed and almost a stealth tax. There has to be better ways for the industry to still make money and let the cosumers get the media from wherever they like or at least get it for a good price, for example it is often cheaper for me to buy a CD then it is to buy from iTunes, how can this possibly work, it cost more to make a CD downloaded has no CD yet costs more (a sense a little greed here)
We then move on to how music is no distributed and listened to. Radio is taking a back seat, the associations wont license Podcasts, and only the popular blogs publish what people want to read and lets not even get into myspace. How do we discover really good new music?? Well there’s a new section of my site (thats it check out the music pages when you’ve finished reading this) and then there is the IODA Alliance: http://www.iodalliance.com/ and the Podsafe music network http://music.podshow.com I also urge you to check out ReIgnition Records www.reignition.com
I will leave this post with a thought:
You and some of your mates are a band just starting out, you produce a CD and put your music online in the iTMS, napster etc. You find that your Album is more illegally downloaded than it is bought and you get no money for these illegal downloads. Would you be pissed off? I know i certainly would be.
Now I haven’t spent long enough thinking about these issues to offer anything remotely profound; but on one point you raise, why pay to download from iTunes or whoever, rather than buy a cheap CD? Yes, it is possible sometimes to buy CDs for less, but as anyone with several hundred CDs has discovered, storing, archiving, and finding what you want can be a pain. Then there’s the dusting! The attraction, to me at least,of iTunes and the like works on several levels. Often, I want a particular song, not the whole album, and iTunes gives me that almost instantly, all for about half the cost of a decent cup of coffee; very appealing, despite the fact that I don’t own an MP3 player. I love to organise music into collections that suit me, according to whim, and do so with blank CDs for when I’m on the move. It’s very easy to be in charge of your whole music collection with iTunes in particular. Now I still buy CDs, particularly when there are a good few tracks that I know I’ll really like (next on my list is Bill Withers’ ‘Ultimate Collection’, as I just discovered by chance that I enjoy his music every bit as much as I did twenty plus years ago), and in this case, paying to download tracks really can work out very expensive. [As an aside, because I am old enough to have begun my music collection with many a vinyl album, what I really miss most about the old days is how valuable the sleeve notes were in discovering everything about a song and the personel involved in making the recording; that, and the intimacy of vinyl, could almost make you feel you were present in the studio for the recording.]
For the iTunes afficionado, there is the simple pleasure of partnering with Apple, and the subtle yet alluring feeling of righteousness that goes with such an association. And finally, as someone who subscribes to the Do-As-You-Would-Be-Done-By mindset, I like to know that the statement I make about an artist when I choose to play their music for my pleasure is one of appreciation, shown by my readiness to reward – in other words, however I aquire the music, I prefer to pay something, unless of course the artist(s) intended for it to be free.