. If the beer industry priced beer out of my grasp.... -- A Squared
Flightinfo.com could not handle the amount of messages required if that were to happen. The host computer would surely ionize.
Anyway, however one chooses to show displeasure toward the recording industry (not buying records, swapping files, etc.), the result is the same: several groups of "innocent bystanders" are harmed. The manager at the Strawberries/Wherehouse/Tower, his/her employees, the truck driver who delivers the CDs, and yes, even the artist. It is unfortunate, because most of these folks are trying to simply make a living. They are not deserving of the collective contempt of a group of people who believe that they are subverting a greedy, collusive enclave of executive types. Truth be told, the "recording industry" is too varied to paint with the same brush. There are record companies out there who are generally interested in putting out quality art at the expense of large profits, and there are more publicized entities which care little about the sound coming off the CD, as long as they can market it and sell it for maximum profit. The market should decide which of these entities last, and which fail. The only fly in the ointment lies in the area of
distribution. For many years (and it may or may not still be the case, it's been a while since I read "Hit Men" --good book about the industry), several of the largest recording companies held a relative stranglehold on distribution rights -- the ability to take a recording and distribute it out to the many large retailers. You could choose to record with a smaller label, but you would have an awfully hard time getting your recording into the chain stores. So that meant driving around the country selling to independent stores out of the back of your Scooby Doo van. Now with the internet in the picture, hopefully artists can direct market their recordings via their own websites, and allow people to download albums directly from the website, while paying a more LP like price for a full length CD recording. The artists could then take home a significantly higher percentage of their CD royalties than they do in the present system, and people could gripe about certain artists' practices instead of lambasting the whole industry. Then we'd only have to find a job for the record store people and the truck driver -- burgeoning blank CD industry, perhaps? (Yeah, Memorex makes a comeback!)
Now that I've carried on and on about God knows what....I have a question for BigD: Does your Apple service give you consistently good levels from song to song, artist to artist? I have the Lycos subscription service, which is ok, but they still need to sign up a lot more artists, and the levels vary subsantially from album to album -- makes for some interesting mix CDs.