Digital Music Enjoys Golden Week

An anonymous reader writes to tell us Yahoo News is reporting that the last week of December turned out to be a golden week for music downloads. From the article: 'In the seven-day stretch between Christmas and the new year, millions of consumers armed with new MP3 players (primarily iPods) and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes and other download retailers, Nielsen SoundScan reports. In the process, consumers shattered the tracking firm's one-week record for download sales.'"

Comments

MP3 market penetration

[dannytaggart]

I found this even more interesting:

And for the first time, sales of MP3 players are surpassing sales of personal CD players and CD shelf systems

Something for the music industry to think about.

Imagine how much more they could sell

[Saint37]

If the RIAA had not angered so many customers, they would have sold alot more songs. Unfortunately, I know alot of people who won't buy any music at all until the middleman is removed.

http://www.stockmarketgarden.com/

It's all about visions

[argoff]

It really is all about visions. To many of us, the intnernet envisions a future with the uninhibited unrestricted free flow of information - where all knowledge and creative works will be birthed into the world thru creative collaberation, or thru services, or thru just plain giving for free as a side effect of private interests. To the music industry, and the RIAA in particular, the internet envisions a future where every piece of content is tagged and charged for with the promise of unlimited profit and royality and the prospect of endlessly being able to nickel and dime the consumer to the highest order - but to inpose this vision requires that they coerce upon people and technology companies, an infrastructure of controll - where no piece of information can leak out and risk becomming free.

Moral: This is like an ALL or NOTHING game

People who want to play half hearted, and allow some room for copyrights in this age are only going to continue to feed the beast that is trying to enslave them. Copyrights are like a vine that will never stop growing to choke off peoples freedom until we cut it off at the root. One of these days people are going to realise that copyrights are not about artists, writers, developers, incentive, or "property", or even profit, they are only about control. Controll, even if that means the loss of privacy, free speech, and controll over our PC's.