A good quote from Paul Rapp's text 'Somewhat Legal Look at the Dawn and Dusk of the Napster Controversy' (2001)
"...the wagons are circling. The music industry, over the past several years, has experienced unprecedented corporate consolidation. There were some eight major record labels a few years ago; soon there will be only four. This consolidation has resulted in a uniformity in the industry's response to the perceived dangers lurking on the internet, and a marked lack of creativity in that response.In addition, this concentration of power has greatly affected the content of the music that the majors have offered to the public. In short, there is less variety and much less volume, in terms of the number of titles and artists, in the music being offered. Artists have been handed their walking papers, dropped by labels that have decided to concentrate on chart-topping, manufactured content providers like Brittany Spears and N'Synch. Any college kid with an ear to the ground of popular music has a favorite band that has gotten the boot. Classical and jazz divisions are being eviscerated. The industry looks less like a vehicle to deliver culture and more like, well, an industry, one devoted to the lowest common denominator and to hell with everything else.
It's little wonder, then, that the music industry's cries of righteous indignation about the horrors of the Internet have been met with unstifled yawns and a few snickers of disgust. The industry has made itself into the boogey-man, and music aficionados, especially college kids, [couldn't] care less whether the industry lives or dies.
A fundamental reason why there is an MP3 phenomenon is that the music industry has failed, refused, to pick up the ball. There is no way to receive the vast majority of major label music digitally over the Internet except for free. Even if you wanted to buy major label music over the Internet, you can't, because the major labels have yet to offer their music digitally in a downloadable format."
I subscribed to emusic.com for a while, IIRC it was $15 a month. I could download as much as I wanted, in mp3 format without any DRM. I subscribed as I wanted a Treepeople album I had not been able to track down in CD form. My wife downloaded some stuff too. We ended up cancelling it as we werent downloading more than an album a week. Unfortunately it didnt have a lot of the Australian independant music I liked and was reminiscing for.
Now we use iTunes, and we only buy singles. My wife still buys CDs, but they get ripped into iTunes/iPod pretty quickly. I have pretty much gone off mainstream music, most of the new mp3s I have are from folks I know, who have distributed their music, or their mates music, directly to me. My recent listening tastes are probably more eclectic than ever. I guess that is the same distribution mechanism as the old demo cassette tape being handed around.
Posted by: Cameron Riley on May 22, 2005 01:30 AM