Music industry wants to treat file sharers as terrorists

[Stoo]

With the speed and accessability of the internet, the vast majority of us really shouldn't have to deal with record companies and games publishers anymore. What needs to happen is for the artists to start selling their music online, without any involvement from the record companies.

If an artist gets £3.50 every time you buy a £12.99 cd from a high-street store, wouldn't it make sense for both parties if it were possible to pay, say, £4.00 online, for the same album, cutting out the record company, and the retailer (both of whom take grotesque profits from something they really had no hand in making).

The fact is that the artists don't make anything like that from an album sale, and more often they make a loss once promotion, production, distribution costs etc are factored in. Online sales? Nope, the RIAA gets pretty much everything from that (at least in America) too.

This is why the model is broken, the artists are under pressure to churn out music which just isn't the best work they can produce, so we don't buy it because it's crap. The record label gets the wind up, and implements draconian measures to ensure that you have to buy the album to find out if it's crap or not. Meanwhile, the artist goes bankrupt and in some cases leaves the industry completely.

What is really needed is something that utterly cuts out the traditional record labels, reduces both the creative and financial pressure on the artists, and doesn't need both illegal DRM measures and dubious laws introduced purely to protect the record industry's profit margin.

</rant>

[nichomach]

Agreed, Stoo - and though this has probably already been posted before, it bears reposting here:

http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

[ahat]

Wonderful.
Albini is a legend. Good link for this thread.