Originally Posted by griffin8r
I reckon you don't recall the history of the music industry's positions regarding "piracy".
The record labels fought tooth and nail against the advent of cassette tapes, because they said "no one will buy our records if every Tom, Dick, and Harry can copy them off of friends"
Suddenly, they realized that the cassette was a highly degradable format, and releasing music on it was a sure vehicle to getting not only first-time sales, but repeat sales of the same music, over and over again as the tapes went to crap.
The advent of CD spelled the end of LP's because of the music industry marketing hype - "they're indestructable! And they sound better than any other format!" (both of which were abject lies)
Then along came recordable CD's - and man, was there ever hissing and spitting coming out of Sony, Capitol, Geffen, and the rest. "Perfect Digital copies will kill the industry" - and they fought tooth and nail against the producers of writable media, and finally extracted a settlement that artificially drove the price of that media up as a pre-emptive "royalty" for using it to do things like back up your own music collection. Extra fun for indie bands like the one I was in at the time, because the cost of the blank CD's killed most of our profit margin on producing our own discs, because we didn't have the budget to meet the minimums all the reproduction houses wanted back then (1999) - so we got to pay major labels a fee to sell our own damned music.
Then came Napster. Why was Napster such a huge hit? Because, particularly at that time, the industry was cranking out sorry album after sorry album with one good song and a bunch of filler, and selling it for ever-higher prices (this was when CD's were around $16 at most places, prior to the apex of $20 more recently) and people were sick of getting soaked for $16 for one song. This gave people a chance to listen to a few other songs on the album and decide if it was worth buying.
Here's the comedy:
If the record industry had brought a for-pay a la carte download service back then, they wouldn't be chasing down every tom, dick, and harry now, because back then, Napster, Grokster, and all the other P2P free services were rife with spyware, distributed viruses, and all manner of other issues, and people would have gladly paid for the convenience of not dealing with that shit.
Instead, the industry begins the litigation-mania, right at a time when the American public has little tolerance for high-profile litigation.
And what's worse is, they come after the most bizarre targets. I don't reckon you recall the grandmother who got sued by the RIAA for something in the neighborhood of $165,000 because she had MP3's on her computer that her grandson had downloaded...
That's what I mean about them creating the "us vs. them" mentality. Heavy handed, litigious, and indiscrete. Instead of adapting to new technology, the music industry has fought it, all the way down the line.
When the Harry Fox agency opened their online license shop, it was the smartest move they ever made, because prior to that, people who wanted to "cover" songs had no clue where to go to get that permission. Now, it's $40 to get your license (as long as you don't sell more than 500 copies) and you're nice and legal.
No different with music distribution. Instead of suing everybody, they could have nipped it all in the bud by opening an iTunes long ago.
I'm not saying the pirates are right, I'm just saying the music industry has historically treated their customers like thieves, long before the internet existed....
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