The beginnings of an untitled final

In an impressive display of awareness, the Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry's legislative arm that sues the pants off dead grandmothers for alleged "copyright infringement", finally ceased taking music fans to court in December 2008 after realizing that legal battles were an ineffective deterrent and didn't resolve the problem whatsoever. If the recession is making mortgage payments a struggle, it's hard to imagine being able to hand over $4 million in copyright infringement fees. As the RIAA pursues other avenues to bust music pirates, the labels are still left struggling to find ways to get people to pay for music in a culture that has already embraced the idea of music being something you collect in large volumes, and trade freely with your friends.

File-sharing between computers has been around since the IBM heyday of the 80's, but broadband internet and the seminal peer-to-peer program Napster familiarized the mainstream with the MP3 like never before. Music became an all-you-can-eat digital buffet, and independent web sites like Oink's Pink Palace offered a library more comprehensive than any record store on earth, in any format, and at no cost. The unprecedented digital model was more efficient than record stores, it was powered by music fans, and, well, it was free. How do you beat free?

Obviously the labels were feeling a bit threatened, so the RIAA launched a legal assault on 35,000 music pirates over the next 5 years, employing illegal investigative methods, harassment, and impersonation to bully everyone from 4 year old girls to stroke victims. PR disasters such as these helped paint the music industry as a corporation of greedy, malicious, and ignorant dinosaur-thugs who couldn't understand fan's attempts to rebel against the outdated structure of the entertainment industry.

The unprecedented amount of control the internet offers over music is tantalizing because it shifts power back to the fans and makes it possible for people to listen to, learn about, and share music they might otherwise never hear. A survey by Yankelovich Partners for the Digital Media Association found that about half of the music fans in the United States turn to the Internet to search for artists they don't hear on local radio stations. If the range of one's music choices is limited to homogenized Top 40 radio and the meager selection of overpriced CDs at Wal-Mart, is it really any wonder that people want to expand their options and give themselves access to what's really out there?

Apparently, the answer is yes. Instead of capitalizing on the thrilling new possibilities technology afforded them, the "Big Four" (Universal, Sony, Warner, EMI) have refused to alter their business models to work with changes in the marketplace, instead pointing fingers and blaming music piracy for lost sales. Now the industry's ship is in the middle of the Atlantic and it's sinking. For the past eight years, CD sales have continually plummeted while digital downloads, both legal and illegal, have flourished.

The economic stormclouds of 2009 only magnify the main argument of the immoral music thieves against the evil oligarchy of major record labels: music is too expensive. Complaints about overpriced CDs (and the absurd amounts of money harmless music fans can be fined for copyright violations) have never felt more real and urgent. Despite CDs being approximately 25% cheaper than they were in 2000, fans and labels cannot see eye-to-eye anymore.

After the industry walloped on their heads with lawsuits, conquered and crippled their favorite online resources, imposed clumsy and ineffective protection technology on their still overpriced music, fans lost all trust in the industry as an entity that cared about their interests. There is no longer the two-way trust relationship that existed in the 90's between fan and retailer.

Paying $20 for a CD was acceptable because the customer could believe in the fact that they were getting a high quality product, complete with liner notes and album artwork. Distributors were willing to put the time and effort into such quality releases based on the assurance that their customers weren't online stealing their product. Then the aggressive push of technology combined with the arrogant response from the industry left music fans to choose between bending over to the whims of major labels or becoming a criminal. And instead of popular music getting a bit more adventurous and experimental due to the influx of new music suddenly available online, the decrease in sales caused label executives to only properly promote safe, easy acts they know have a better chance of selling, such as The Jonas Brothers.

So now that sales are in the toilet, artists and businessmen will have to engage in a musical survival of the fittest. How do you get anyone to pay for your music if it's available online? Aside from releasing great music, the answer seems to be incentives. English rock band Radiohead embraced this new, digital platform and decided to self-release their last record, In Rainbows online with a "pay-what-you-want-to" pricing scheme that allowed people to acquire the music while paying what they ultimately thought it to be worth. Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails have been giving fans incentives that can't be replicated online, such as CDs that change color after being heated up in a CD player. Even a band as huge as U2 took extra steps...

Realizing that the determination of fans to share music is stronger than the determination of corporations to stop it.