music industry

Trent Reznor paid $5080.00 for Radiohead's In Rainbows:

I bought the physical one, so I spent a whopping $80. [Pauses] But, then I re-bought it and paid $5,000, because I really felt that I need to support the arts, so people could follow in my footsteps.

Artists and bands can now produce their own music on a laptop with a realistic budget and fantastic results. They can take charge of their own promotion and distribution through MySpace, Last.fm and Indiestore. The digital music revolution has lowered music production costs to almost nothing. So why does the music industry still hold so tightly to their feudalistic business model and unrealistic constraints? Why do artists still only receive pennies on the dollar for iTunes Music Store sales? Why are boxed sets of music which was bought and paid for over fifty years ago still being sold for upwards of $40 when the cost to the record label is really less than $4? MySpace et al. are in a position to cripple this prehistoric beast of an industry. We're watching a revolution happen, and I couldn't be more excited.

I'm sitting here trying to muster up an opinion about the trade off between rights and protection. To what extent can a governments infringe on the rights of its citizens to protect them from potential harm? I'm coming up short. Indifference like this is why our individual rights are slowly eroded from beneath our feet.

Apple caters to the majority market share with their iPod, and in return the consumers accept the DRM pushed on them. For the most part, nobody balks when told that they are allowed to use the song they purchased from the iTunes Music Store on one and only one computer, and on one and only one iPod [note: i know this is not the case any more. but it was for a long time... and the average user didn't even balk]. Nobody bats an eye when they are told that the DVD that they purchased was actually a license for only that medium, and that they will have to buy another copy if they wish to transfer it to their iPod.