The entertainment industry — Hollywood, for short — has done an amazing job of using mainstream print and electronic media to snow the public at large into believing anyone who shares digital music files online is a hard-core villain, out to steal bread from the mouths of starving artists. Using the Recording Industry Association of America — owned by the Big Five record labels — as a foil, it loses no opportunity to speak of file swappers in the same breath as organized criminals who counterfeit or duplicate DVDs and software for resale on the black market.
I've read many storys like this one. I'm a CPA who is also a musician & a computer programer. Even if the music industry could keep everyone from copying cds (which they'll never be able to do), there problems would still be far from over. I think that the one issue that all the stories miss is the fact that for a small chunk of change you can turn your computer into a small recording studio. It doesn't cost very much for a band to produce their own quality music cd. And thanks to the internet it cost even less for them to promote & distribute it. There are plenty of very talented, strugling, seasoned musicians, who have other day jobs, capable of putting together some very nice music. Maybe this garage band model isn't very perdominant yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes perdominate in the future. Even if the music industry could achieve their wet dream of keeping everyone from copying their music, maybe in the future no one will want to copy their music anyway. They'll never be able to control the music industry like the once did. In the past they had a very strong barrier-to-entry in the fact that they controled distribution and marketing. The thing that the music industry is griping over is the fact that they will no longer control who the super-stars will be, nor will they control distribution.
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Hollywood, the RIAA and Commercialism in the Classroom
Posted by: Jon Newton May 5, 2004 10:53 AMThe entertainment industry — Hollywood, for short — has done an amazing job of using mainstream print and electronic media to snow the public at large into believing anyone who shares digital music files online is a hard-core villain, out to steal bread from the mouths of starving artists. Using the Recording Industry Association of America — owned by the Big Five record labels — as a foil, it loses no opportunity to speak of file swappers in the same breath as organized criminals who counterfeit or duplicate DVDs and software for resale on the black market.