As long as you have brick-and-mortar record stores selling music, you need the recording industry. From what I can see, the price of a retail CD is divided into 3 roughly equal parts: the record company (who owns the artist), the distributor and the retailer.
When you start buying CDs online, you can reach the point where you cut out the distributor and save roughly 1/3 of the cost. Suppose you want a CD that's on the Sony label. You go to their retail web site and order it, and you have it in a few days.
Or suppose you could opt to just buy the music without the "real" pieces. You'd probably save about 10% more by replacing the manufacturing process with direct-to-consumer digital distribution. A combination of the two would probably be the most attractive option for people like me. I would buy the CD online, get immediate access to the broadband music, and get a package in the mail a few days later.
But the real beauty of this system is that it gives very small labels and even artists themselves access to the consumer. It's impossible for a new band to get on the shelves at Wal-Mart or Best Buy, but anyone can sell on the internet.
What the industry needs is a standardized player technology that gives the full quality of the original recording (MP3 doesn't, by the way), and prevents unauthorized copying of the original digital bits. The encoding technology has to be
very cheap and eaisily available for people who make the music, and the decoding technology has to be
totally free and unbreakable.
This would leave the old-school distributors out in the cold, but it would reduce the cost of CD music and encourage startup enterprises at the same time.
I think that this path is obvious to the RIAA, but they don't like the fact that it encourages small labels. They keep looking for a proprietary solution that would continue to freeze out the little guys, like the current distribution system does. As long as they continue down that path, they will fail.
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Bobby Lee - email:
quasar@b0b.com -
gigs -
CDs
Sierra Session 12 (E9), Williams 400X (E9, D6), Sierra Olympic 12 (F Diatonic)
Sierra Laptop 8 (D13), Fender Stringmaster (E13, A6)