Nearly everyone has heard that the record business is hurting these days, if you haven’t then you are officially living under a rock.

As of 2007 48% of American teens are NOT buying music on CD and piracy over P2P networks is soaring to new highs.  In turn though this has led to the rising success of services like iTunes and Amazon MP3, these services sell music at prices people are willing to pay and in a way that lets them use the music how they want.  Kids are still customers they just prefer to listen to music their own way now instead of how the record companies intended.

All these large media companies are being run by Absolute Idiots who are much like the big three American car companies of the 70′s in that they have no idea how to make money in this new and different market.  The President of the RIAA even tried to reduce the consumers right to fair use (back a couple years ago) as a way to save his industries decaying business model.  Hey if you can’t rip a CD to your computer then your more likely to buy the same song everytime you want to play it on a new device.

Unlike the American car companies of yore these buffoons managed to sink their own battleship by suing Napster out of existence in 1999 when this whole music sharing thing was still in its infancy. Things only get worse for them in 2003 when Apple introduced the iTunes Store and with it a price fixing system for online sales.  That left these Music Industry Idiots with a devalued product that led to Apples lead in portable devices (iPods) which is distribution channel that they can’t possibly control.

One may be wondering where to go from here as the business appears to be in the gutter with the fans used to free, open and cheap music.   There may not be one answer that can help them gain back the prestige they once enjoyed.  That said the single best thing they could do today would be to stop suing customers for file sharing and embrace it.

They should:

• Create an open license (similar to the Creative Commons license I use on here) for artists to share music online and help them distribute it by starting social networking sites that help artists reach the fans.
• They need to work with each other because if the big labels could collaborate they wouldn’t waste time and money competing against each other (aka the way it doesn’t need to be spent}).
• Embrace open codecs, MP3 is king only because you don’t support open standards.
• Support a universal portable media player project with the likes of Google to help break the Apple Monopoly.

My blog is not even a blip on the radar of these companies, even if they did hear about this post they wouldn’t change.  Corporate America is just so much of a beurocracy that it won’t come around until the next generation unless something major happens first.  Until then I think its fair to say the Pirate Bay’s of this world will have a large audience.

Posted on April 21st, 2008 by Furious Citizen
Filed under: Industry News, Music