Music Biz: Compromise Is Key?

from the it-is? dept

I have nothing against the idea of compromising to make a solution work, but how does that work when one side is simply wrong? Wired News is running an article with tons of quotes from people in the music business giving their opinions on the whole downloadable music question. Some musicians agree that the public has spoken, and they clearly want downloadable music. Others, however, are still bogged down by RIAA-inspired logic. There are those who say this is a moral issue. They say that consumers need to be convinced that downloading music is "wrong". The problem is that most people don't think it's wrong to listen to a song. The fact is, it's not a moral issue, it's an economic one. The price of music is being driven down because the costs are being driven down. If the industry really understood economics they'd look for ways to actually improve the value of what they were offering instead of making moral/legal arguments. There's also a musician who claims that we'll "miss" the major labels when they're gone, because they did all the filtering. Of course, in a world with real music sharing, you don't need music label filtering. You can get much more useful and accurate filtering by finding "trusted" sources, or seeing what other listeners who are "like you" like to listen to.