Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/12/01/canadas-music-lobby-admits-w.html
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Did the bribe money stop rolling in? Or perhaps the guy just realized one day that what he was lobbying for was worse than even cigarettes, it was the slow death of culture?
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“the gross mismatch between the volume of music being enjoyed by consumers and the revenues being returned to the music community.”
This. This is what gets me about digital culture. The industry seems to think that every individual needs to buy their own copies, that there’s no such thing as sharing between family members or friends. Never mind that’s been a path to discoverability for as long as someone’s been able to pick up a lute and say, “I heard a new one the next town over…”
Yes yes yes sharing is easier now, but that also ignores why people share:
- they only wanted the one track that was a hit, not the other 12 tracks of sub-par padding
- it never came out in digital format, so someone did the vinyl-to-digital conversion and shared it
- they already own the vinyl and don’t want to re-buy their record collection
- the try before you buy of new music
And yeah, not everyone buys when they can, but 30 years ago the guy whose entire music collection was cassettes of friends’albums existed, and 50 years ago the guy who borrowed records and never returned them existed.
[Edited to fix some phone typos]
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People have forgotten that, back in the 1980s, record stores tried this thing called “renting” in order to stay in business. You’d walk into a record store and then pay less than full price to “rent” a record for a specified period of time. Then you would return it. The music industry shut that idea down hard and fast.
The reason they stopped this practice remains obscure. You see, many of the very same companies were unable to stop the rental of videotapes containing motion pictures – motion pictures being considerably more expensive to produce than recordings of music. It all vanished in the haze that makes copying a recording an affront to artists, but selling used copies perfectly acceptable.
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RIAA could have made a shit ton of money but instead fought the digital change. I wonder if they’d still be complaining if they started iTunes (or whatever it would be called) instead of Apple? My guess is yes they would still complain…
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Yep. All it takes is one person getting the digital album and it’s out on the torrent sites. If the industry wants to stop “EVIL PIRATES?!?”, all they need to do is make their product cheaper and NOT region locked. That won’t ever happen though.
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You’d walk into a record store and then pay less than full price to “rent” a record for a specified period of time. Then you would return it. The music industry shut that idea down hard and fast.
That idea continues to live on and is thriving at the local public library with a (usually) free library “membership” card.
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Which the media companies would love to get rid of. Considering who is going to be president, that very well could happen. 
Thank you, thank you, Sir! We would never have realized that all those laws were unfounded in facts without you telling us!
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