How to live without the music industry feedback

The article created a lot of feedback, mostly positive on the subject and I would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone for their comments and present a compilation of those comments in this new article.

Most visitors agreed that the decision of the RIAA to turn on its customers badly damaged their image and unfortunately that of musicians as well. It seems to a lot that they don't care as much about the music as they care about profits.

I think they (the Music Industry) are exaggerating the problems that internet pirates cause to their profits. Its true that the internet made it easier to distribute music, and that's something the music industry does not understand til today. They see it as a threat that "their" music will be distributed without control to many consumers who in turn don't buy the music anymore because they already have it on their computer.

They don't recognize that this is the way music will be distributed in this century. They missed the opportunity when p2p appeared, when services like audiogalaxy offered music in a direct easy way.

Most consumers will pay for music. That's a fact. We pay with our money and we demand more than just music. We want to be able to use it in our mp3 player, in our car and on our computer without being branded as someone who is copying music illegally.

We don't want to have rootkits and anti-copy mechanisms on our music CDs. That's a no-no, especially if those rootkits only run on windows and not on other operating systems. What sense does it make? It only prevents the normal user who would have traded the music with their friends are affected by it. It does not prevent the internet pirate who probably gets a pre-release copy to spread it wide and fast.

Instead of going on confrontation course with customers, they should try and make the majority of customers happy once again. And this can only be achieved by listening to them and not by acting against them.

I would like to comment specifically on Kazrog´s post:

"The type of industry “downsizing this blog is advocating, which is essentially downsizing the industry until it does not exist, is going to make it virtually impossible for artists to continue making music, and is going to cripple a vast set of industries internationally."

Its not my intention to destroy the music industry. What I want is the following. I want them to concentrate on what their customers want and I want them to stop acting against their customers. I know that the "music has to be free" idea is an ideal which will never be reached, at least not in the near future. All they will have to do is adopt to the new demands of their customers, that means:

Build good internet portals where one is able to purchase music for a reasonable fee without DRM and a fair use policy. We all see Apples iTunes success, most customers want to buy music, but only if it can be used the way they want to use it.

I´d like to end with a listing all the new sites that you posted in the comments, its really helpful to receive so many recommendations to sites that I never heard of.

• Archive.org: Live music archive, over 27000 recordings plus over 40000 audio files.
• Cdbaby.com: Another free music site.
• etree.org: was not able to load page atm, seem to have probs.
• Pandora.com: Music stream site.
• Epitonic.com: Clean professional looking site with lots of free music.
• hypemachine: gathers songs posted on mp3 blogs.

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