I urge you to read an excellent New York Times Online article, "The Internet as Jukebox, at a Price" by David Pogue, discussing the music industry's clumsy entrance into the arena of online filesharing — with a cost. An excerpt from the article:
The only thing record companies know for sure is that they want to kill off the insanely popular Sons of Napster: free music-sharing services like KaZaA, Gnutella and Morpheus. After all, the millions who use these services are in effect stealing music, depriving the five major labels of perfectly good money. But watching the record companies as they try to find a formula for a successful paid alternative is like watching five people play blindman's bluff on stilts.This article prompted an excellent exchange of emails between dormant NMWYH staff writer, Eric Hallstrom, and your humble narrator's frequent concert companion, Sach Darji, which went something to this effect:
SD: Though I've never tried any of the major label music download services, I don't foresee it ever being successful unless you can stream anything in the catalog for free, and download and burn anything in the catalog for $1 a song, with some sort of nominal monthly fee. I'm not sure I buy the arguments of music critics and the music industry that people would prefer to pay to legally download their music — it is just a matter of convenience. Most of the people I know who steal music will never pay for music again unless there is some sort of value added (like satellite radio, with zillions of channels of original music programming and no commercials).EH: I agree, although I think there is a point to the industry-sponsored mucking up of the file-swapping system. If they can succeed in breaking the system, they will add value by virtue of it working at all. The music industry just doesn't get it, and nobody really wants to say it, but there are a lot of people who like stealing the music because (1) the industry has been fleecing us for a long time with $15-$20 CD prices[Ed: Yes!], and (2) an awful lot of folks feel that celebs aren't worth the millions they make off of us regular folks.
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Article comments
1 - SATISH BHARDWAJ
The writer is totally misguided in tghat he misses the point completely. It is not a question of how much he should download or will download under various circumstances. The point is should he be able to download. There is something wrong with a download based web surfing. It shold be replaced by a different technology that is not based upon downloading. It is server side processing wherein the role of the client is limited to communicating with the server i.e the role of the client is merely to send the processing instructions to the server.
The question is would RIAA continue to incur the wrath of the public by adopting its self rightous policy and seeking to prosecutre people who download or to work to see the alternate technology become reality?