Posts tagged “music industry”

Paid £5 for In Rainbows because it's the right model, and Madonna, Oasis, and Jamiroquai agree. After a decade of futile resistance, the recording industry is dying. Good riddance. The middle-managers and risk-averse marketers who killed music through the 90s deserve to lose their jobs. Real musicians care about listeners, not money.

I steal music and I know it's wrong. But record companies are technological dinosaurs charging 10x what music is worth, crippling their products with DRM, and offering a terrible experience compared to piracy. I'd pay a fair price for a convenient, unrestricted product. Nobody's offering me one.

The RIAA sued a 12-year-old honor student living with her single mom in low-income housing. She settled for $2000. Whatever you think of her defense, that's just wrong. Help pay back her settlement.

Compulsory licensing for free music downloads sounds appealing but doesn't work. The real fix is making buying music easier than stealing it. Right now, stealing wins on convenience. I'd pay per song for guaranteed quality, but not RIAA prices -- they're a useless middleman ripping everyone off.

Surprising news: the major labels are offering legal downloads at reasonable prices. Meanwhile they're also poisoning file-sharing networks with fake songs. Plus a roundup of cool links: credit-card cameras, a Unix Rosetta Stone, mind-blowing nanotech storage and more.

The RIAA is planning PR campaigns and "spoofing or interdiction" against file-sharing services. That's industrial sabotage, which is illegal, but these are the same folks deliberately breaking CDs to prevent copying, so I guess the law is optional for them.