The answer: access fees and advertising dollars in an "all you can eat" digital music bar.
This will reinvent the music biz and make money for all....with artists having much more control of their own destinies.
Mp3s are poor faxcimiles of the original content, they have one 10th the audio quility of a full recording. I have said for years that any serious audio fan wont be satisfied with the MP3 ver and that those who are satisfied arent serious consumers of the artists music. Its just advertisment
By choosing to fight progress instead of embracing it and making it work FOR them instead of against them, the MPAA and the RIAA have done a great deal of damage to themselves.
This would be a great move in the right direction. It may be too little too late though.
Right now it sounds about as probable as "Microsoft to open-source Windows and Office codebase..." ;-)
The music industry isn't losing money because of file sharing. It's losing money because their product is crap. The big A&R and marketing dollars are all about hoodlum music and skanky girl pop. They have put no real talent out for over a decade.
Stick a fork in the RIAA.
haven't bought an album by a major label in years, and I'm not gonna start doing it tomorrow.
This is the way the dinosaur media will have to go to survive as well. They will have to go to all online pubs and then get paid by ISPs or search engines, who then allow their customers free access.
All I can do is shake my head in amazement. The people who run these companies are such a bunch of morons and techno-dunces.
Artists never have control of their destinies. Their star is hitched to a wagon that is never going fast enough. They will always complain even if they are successful beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. In fact, the very rich ones (Metallica & U2) will do whatever ensures them even more wealth. But there was once a time when they played their songs on a couch in a rotten old living room with friends all around... never again.
Record labels are imploding, thank God. Justice for serving up nothing less than a music holocaust for the past 25 years.
Right after they stop pressing 45s, and 78 lps!
They are just trying to milk the golden goose outta the last few eggs left for them.
I doubt it. I'm against all the DRM garbage. See my tagline -- Sony's rootkit got them on my Permanent Boycott list, and they didn't get a few hundred dollars in a recent camera purchase. (My main machine at home is now a Linux box, lacking all Vista's DRM.)
I don't share my MP3s with others, and all my MP3s are either from my purchased CDs or freebie downloads from the performers (Holst's "The Planets" and Stravinsky's "Petrushka").
I think CDs are a bit overpriced, else my collection would be quite a bit larger, but they've simply raised the threshold at which I proceed with a purchase, and reduced the frequency -- my last two purchases were made last March (and with my eclectic taste in music, these were two CDs of Persian music, not the kind of stuff you're likely to find shared anyway).
If their prices dropped, the amount of money I spend on music CDs would very likely increase because the "ouch" factor of each purchase would go down. (And the budget would allow for same -- something else entertainment-related would go unpurchased instead.)
Where's the fun in that? ; )