Via digg, there's a well-done article over on torrentfreak on how music pirating is going to force the record industry to change its approach. The author suggests basically a membership fee, with people getting to use whatever format or means of obtaining music they want, just forking $5 a month over to the music industry to obtain a license to do whatever they'd like with it - the same setup that developed with radio. It's an interesting idea, though I don't think it could in any way be practical - you'd split up the money among whatever artists were most downloaded? how on earth do you measure that, without tracking everyone on the internet, which, god knows, wouldn't exactly be the most popular idea.

For all that I live with the issue, I still haven't the faintest what the answer is...I just know we haven't found it yet. Everyone hails Radiohead's internet release of their latest album, where you could download it for free, and then pay whatever you wanted for it - nothing at all, or as much as you wanted. Fantastic move for them - but how many bands have a large enough fanbase and enough status to make that sort of thing plausible? (Apparently the average paid for the album was $6 - higher than I was expecting, I was pretty happy to hear that. Taking out most of the corporate overhead from the band's expenses, that sounds about right I think.)

Someone on digg suggested that artists will again gain income from performance, as was the case before recorded music became dominant. While granted, tours are the main source of income for a lot of groups...I still hate the fact that I paid $40 to see Nickelback live once, only to be severely disappointed. I mean it was alright, but, not $40 worth. U2 I'll pay whatever I need to see live - but I wouldn't do that if I weren't already a huge fan. And there are plenty of artists out there for whom live performance really *isn't* their key thing. With U2 it is. With..oh I don't know, your flavor of the month popstar, it probably isn't. However awesome the staging of it is, I'm never going to pay $50 to see someone dance around and lipsync. So relying solely on concert revenue isn't an answer either.

Yes, if you cut out the major labels and all the bureaucracy and "big media", the artist makes more profit, and music is cheaper. But then who finds people to make the music videos, the photo shoots, take out ad space, make the freaking t-shirts? Even college bands hit up the local t-shirt store to make their shirts. And while there may be a million artists with MySpace pages and paypal accounts, how do you sift out the high school kids from the professional level artists? That's where Big Media comes in and seperates the wheat from the chaff - and while they may not always be right, for the vast majority of consumers, they *are* right, and while I may not always like what's on the radio, at least it's been produced with some level of competence. How do you hear about an amazing new singer, out of the thousands claiming to be amazing, without all the machinery that big media has in place?

Word of mouth is going MUCH, much farther than it ever used to, thanks obviously to the Internet - people pass things along so quickly, and the networks are getting bigger and bigger. Within a day of its writing, there's thousands of people reading that article on torrentfreak - not only because it's a larger site in itself, but because people jump on digg, where the sheer force of popular consent determines what articles are relevant and worth the time, and which aren't. (Again, it doesn't always give the right answers, but at least it's a start.)

...hell maybe that's my answer, just check what music has been most-googled, and you find out what's the latest thing.


Anyway, the main reason I actually started this post, was to pass along something commented on the article over on digg:

"I hope the RIAA doesnt change their name. it uses all 3 letters in the pirate alphabet.
AAARRRR EYE AYE AYE" -DeFex