Music down

Monday November 28, 2005 - 12:35PM EDT

So I read this article about young people who don't see music as a "paid commodity". The article basically laments that fact and the fact that the industry can't transform them into paying customers when they get older. I am now physically ill. How did it become such a villanous crime to listen to music. This is sickening. Has the industry and artists become so full of themselves and the system that they only want people who pay to listen to their music. It betrays the essence of music. I don't know what to say about this. This is a outstanding example of that perverse drive for wealth that twists so many things. The arguements against file sharing are valid within their own limited context. Music cost money to make, there are laws that you break when you skirt copyrights. But that is all they got really. Copyright law, and their own inefficient system of creation. Those are piss poor reasons to be so vehemently against file sharing. Some change occurs when you start getting a lot of money for music. In the begining you are basically begging people to listen, then you get money for it and you then want to restrict who gets to listen. That is the topic worthy of discussion. What makes the artist change. Because if no one listened when you were begging you'd get no money. Rich artists particularly have no excuse for attacking file sharing. They don't get hurt. Lesser artist probably benefit from it. So who dies here. The excutives, the marketing people, those that make up the ineffecient excess of music are the ones who get manhandled by file sharing. Why didn't I see this before. I did see it but never in this way specifically. Never saw the whole picture as clearly as I do right now. Copyrights don't exist for the artist, they exist for the manager, the middle men, the record companies to protect their profits. Yet somehow artists have been bamboozled into thinking copyrights protect them. Noteriaty protect them and their work. I guess in the purest sense copyrights were created to give protection to artists who's work was unscrupulously duplicated for fame or monetary advantage. I think very few people care whether the crappy ideas they had were copied. So the purely ideological stance is rather weak for copyrights. But now companies and middle men have used copyrights as a basis for their industry. An industry that certain artists rely on so they sort of have to protect it. You now just have to modify the industry not get rid of file sharing. Music downloading services aren't going to cut it, they are a slight modification. So how do you modify the industry? This question seems almost too easy to answer. But for some odd reason is stupendously difficult for anyone to even begin to think about solving. Dare I say that the future foundation of the music industry will not be per-unit consumption of melodies in pre-packaged form in trade for money. That is the current foundation and it is being attacked. Attacked is not the right word to invoke the right analogy. Saying attacked would imply that you need to mount a defense and that is what is going on now. Crumbling would be a better word and would imply that you need to create something new to shore up the foundation. The download services still use the same per-unit idea. They use two things to be successful. Fear of the law and respect of the law. However, if they had appeared about 5-7 years earlier they would have been much more effective because you would have preempted the idea of getting music of the net for free. It would be more normal to pay than to download for free in the majority of users minds. So that is the industry's own mistake. People had been trading music online for years prior on IRC and FTP servers. MP3 format had been out for while so it is not like this stuff was news to the industry. I bet if they had done it much earlier, it would be talked about as if it was some kind of fairy tale, the idea of millions of people trading music online without paying. It would be as if that is the domain of the fringe.