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Napster Not To Blame
enjo13 writes "Slate is running an article on the music industries recent troubles. It articulates exactly what Slashdot has preached all along.. that the Music industry is suffering at its own hands and has no one to blame but itself. All I have to say is... finally." There's actually been a number of pieces like this, but I think this one says it best.
What are you, twelve years old?
Slate has been around for years. Almost as long as Salon (if not longer.)
Michael Kinsley used to edit it. (The same Kinsley who used to sit off to the side of Buckley's _Firing Line_ and goad good ol' Bill with nuggets o' thought.)
Wait, if you don't know Slate, you probably have no idea who W F Buckley is either, right? Or his National Review?
Last time I saw WFB was on Charlie Rose. WFB hosting for Rose. My god. What a painful experience that was.
Anyway, do yourself a favor. Even if you think NR is fulla shit and WFB is fulla shit then hop on over to (a) Slate (occasionally), (b) National Review (occasionally), and (c) the New Republic (occasionally).
You don't need to agree with the views -- but dear god, my boy, get yourself at least a respectable smidgeon of political knowledge -- and awareness of the "standard" political rags -- so you can refrain from posting bizarre stuff like "What is this Slate thing?"
Except that what you describe existed a long time ago. It was a service hosted at, unsuprisingly, my.mp3.com. You could download anything from a huge library, the only catch was that before the server would give you a digital copy of your CD you had to provide it with a checksum of the data off your CD. Sure you could hack around this, but for 90% of people it meant that you had to prove you already owned it before you could download it. Legal sharing.
3 guesses what service was the first target of the RIAA, long before Napster even existed, and the first two don't count.
Give me a break. Someone puts out a record, and has free downloads on her website, and is making money, and THAT is supposed to be an indictment of whatever the RIAA is or is not trying to do ? For all we know, she would sell MORE records if she had a big music company pushing her with the marketing force that only a big music company has. I'm not saying she would or not, but my point is that ONE (or two, or ten) EXAMPLE(s) DOES NOT THE ARGUMENT MAKE.