brando

MySpace Aims to Be the Jukebox of Our Internet Existence

All these "free" music sites are crap IMO. The user experience sucks. When are people going to realize you get what you pay for? Music is in demand, therefore it has value. The paid subscription sites like Rhapsody and Napster where you get all the music all the time without the BS blow away the competition.

Record Companies Starting to Shun iTunes

Markham,

You are correct. The music business cannot survive if things continue in the current direction. The problem is obviously piracy. If people had to procure music legitimately the market would be large enough to support the "new model" everyone seems to think the record labels owe us. Nothing will stop piracy altogether, but our govenrment has a responsibility (one of the few legitimate responsibilities of governement) to allow businesses and people to contol private property. It seems obvious that property laws are not being enforced and the recording industry is punished for this abrogation of duty. Ignore the hecklers from the peanut gallery. Anyone who has listened to an mp3 file believes he is an expert on the economics of producing and distributing music. My fear is that the hecklers are so vocal, and the victims so weak, that the music business will cease to exist before the world realizes what it has killed. BTW, I also agree with you on the best way to procure music. I subscribe to Napster and love it. Cheers.

The Music Biz: Something Important Is On The Horizon

There is one huge horsefly in the soup: illegal peer to peer file stealing. Why aren't you writing about how this has to be stopped? It's the first and foremost thing necessary to move the digital music space into an environment capable of supporting profitability. All the new so called "business models" cropping up are going to end up burning more VC money than the online bakeries and shoe shine shops funded at the turn of the century. Copyright law must be enforced. We are on a slippery slope that could lead to a long and painful decline of creativity and business application of all things digitally filable. Fans don't steal, thus record labels are not suing fans, just common thieves.

CD Sales an Improper Proxy for Measuring Purchased Music Demand

The statisitics I have seen do not verify that digital revenue is at all close to making up for lost physical revenue. Although I understand the public's desire to thwart the record labels from forcing them to repurchase their physical music libraries in digital form, that argument does not hold for young people as most have never had physical music libraries. A serious social issue is developing in the current economic environment for music: the sudden lack of respect for property and the law. Almost all music is copyrighted, meaning it generally cannot be copied for an unrelated third party without the creator/owner's permission. Such permission normally requires compensation. It is morally wrong and against the law, illegal, for people to offer their digital music libraries to millions of strangers via peer to peer file "sharing" (really stealing) networks and it is just as illegal to download these files without paying the artists who created them and the record labels who financed them. I am amazed and confused by the popular argument that record companies should not be suing their fans. People who steal your product are not fans. I'm sorry to say, they are nothing more than common thieves who should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law in order to protect one's rights as a property owner. The situation is entirely out of hand. If public opinion does not change soon, or if the ISPs do not step up and voluntarily filter this illegal content crossing thier networks, congress should intervene and provide statutory relief. Copyright law is the linchpin holding together the greatest movement of creativity the world has ever known -- the U.S. music, record, book and software industries. P2P "sharing" of uncompensated digital files has to be stopped.

Apple, Listen Up: Asia's Getting Hooked On Mobile Music

Why does everyone fawn so over Apple? And why do you care whether they are missing Asia? Apple is so overrated it sorely perplexes me. The hardware is overpriced. You don't really "own" anything of value when you pay $0.99 or $1.29 for their closed system files and you'll have to buy them again when a newer better codec or other technology arrives. And they don't have a subcription option. It is truly a mystery why America is so enamored with the feminine little white boxes that look like a woman's makeup compact. Maybe it's because America has become so feminized overall. Real men subscribe to Napster.