The Recoding Industry is Dead. Long Live Music!

[tarmle]

There is very little short of murder that we would not blithely accept the recording industry as being capable of, but this sort of stupidity really just beggars belief. ASCAP and the BMI want to collect royalties on the 30 second track previews in the iTunes store. It seems as though they are determined to cripple what little business they have

Comments

[tarmle]

For the moment this is true. But I recall similar arguments were made over CD vs. vinyl back in the eighties, and even as late as the ninties: not everyone has a CD player, not everyone can afford to upgrade their sound systems, the older generation just can't understand this new technology. Yet, look where we are now. Doubtless there are still people out there for whom technology reached the limit of their ability to adapt with the 8-track, but they are hardly a market-moving demographic.

CDs did not kill vinyl, but they did radically alter our relationship with it. Digital distribution will do the same to CDs. People will still be buying their content on physical media for years and even decades to come, some because they like it as a solid adjunct to, or representation of their collections, others because they have just been left behind. But as time passes they will represent a smaller and smaller minority.

Vinyl is pretty much a specialist area now; if CD is lucky it will get the same treatment, though it must be said, I find it hard to imagine anyone getting misty-eyed over it.