Monthly Archive for July, 2003
I’ve long thought that the current music ownership and distribution has rapidly become dated and unnecessary and that the first company to put forth a workable business model based on fair use and easy digital availablity would stand to make a killing and also nail shut the coffins of the monolithic dinosaurs of the record industry. I think that day may be getting closer. Robert Cringely has an idea that I’m sure is entirely insane, but may well be one of the best to date. Sure it’s got problems. I don’t quite buy the numbers, and while I’d like to think its legal, it’s questionable enough that with the kind of money the RIAA spends on lobbying I wouldn’t be surprised if any loophole that allowed this is quickly closed. Our legislative branch seems fond of enacting legislation to protect existing business models in the face of needed change. Aside from those issues though, I’m not sure that this would necessarily be beneficial for artists as it stands, but perhaps a variant of it might be.
Meanwhile, a quick scan through a good number of titles in my record collection using the RIAA Radar confirms the expected: the RIAA is largely irrelevant in my day to day music listening. So why are they still here?
So apparently, while I wasn’t looking Emusic got really, well… good. Last time I checked, it was a decent service it seemed, one of the only monthly fee music download services that let you have the songs in pure, unadulterated, DRM free, all-natural mp3 format. Unfortunately, the selection was pretty limited, at least for artists that I was interested in. Then today, in the middle of reading some articles about the pending RIAA civil lawsuits and mediocre new download services, I came across something about Emusic and went to give it another look. This time around, I thought they had a really good selection of stuff I was interested in. I guess I’ll give their trial a go and see if it’s worth keeping around. The only problem is I’m not sure I can get used to the idea of really owning an album after downloading it, even if the artists are compensated as they are in this case. I just don’t know how I feel about not having the actual physical album, cover art, liner notes and all.
Update: 3 hours later and I’ve rolled right through my 50 trial songs and gone into about 18 albums downloaded with about 14 more on my list to get later. I keep looking through their catalog and finding more and more stuff I’d been wanting to get for a long time and even lots of new stuff that I’ve heard about recently. There doesn’t seem to be any end in sight, which brings up my only other concern… how well are the artists being compensated for this. As great as >18 albums for $14.99 is it just leaves me a little unsure how that breaks down into reasonable compensation for all involved. So yeah, I’ll probably end up buying the albums that I really dig, both to have something tangible in my collection and to be sure to support the artist.
Elsewhere