Music industry watch

The end of the RIAA?

I recently mentioned that I think the RIAA needs to go away and EMI is already thinking of defunding the RIAA!

Making the RIAA go away and seriously rethinking the priorities for the IFPI would be an excellent way to change the attitude of the music industry towards their customers. The Swedish government has gotten a really big clue about Internet piracy (thanks to the Pirate Bay, no doubt) and they are advocating making file sharing legal:

Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It’s the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet.

That is very true and very smart for a government to be saying these things. Even further, legalizing non-commercial file sharing is the only way that the record (and movie) companies will ever fully adopt a strategy to embrace the Internet. Having it be legal forces the labels to embrace a model that assumes that its going to be easy to pirate content. Only when labels fully understand this concept will they change to a meaningful business model.

I'm tickled pink to see progress be made -- finally!

Posted by Mayhem at January 11, 2008 01:18 PM