“Protecting the artists” doesn’t capture the whole picture. You can lock up every recording a musician makes in a closet and never make copies, and they’ll be very protected. It’s the same point that Cory Doctorow makes: obscurity is the worse fate. I find that among my acquaintances who do download music sub rosa that they often discover new artists that they then want to support by buying a CD. I myself have been known to look at band websites and Myspace pages to look for music, and while I’ve only bought a few CD’s after getting hooked this way, it was a major factor in deciding what performances to attend. (A few years back I went through a period when I would go out dancing almost every weekend, and covers in St. Louis were anywhere from $3 to $8 a show.) So, whether the MPAA and RIAA are aware of it or not, what they’re really doing is shifting or segmenting the market–rather than consolidating their power over one monolithic Market. Some people will refuse to buy “major label” CD’s, or refuse to buy them new. Some people will only buy things that are on iTunes. Etc. I think it’s wrong to buy a CD and then burn copies for all your friends, but I think there are a lot of other ways in which a couple of songs here and there benefit artists, and that it seems wiser to try to encourage that with the law.

The other thing that I notice, having just run my eyes over a bunch of my CD’s, is that there are a bunch that I bought because of samplers and radio/online play coverage, but there’s also a bunch that I bought because I heard some of it from a friend (in person or on a mix CD) or it was a gift or, in one case, because it kept coming up in someone’s sig file. I think there’s a huge gap in the conversation where the assumption is that you hear something on the radio/XM/MTV and then you either buy the CD (good!) or download it illegally (bad!). It’s just one person and one media machine. But in reality, music, at least in my circles, is omnipresent in social situations. My landlord came over to install a dishwasher and I put on some music I thought he might like, and he did and wanted to know what it was, and he recommended another group to me, etc. This is just my most recent example; similar things happen in the workplace, at parties, in dormitories, in public, etc., etc. If we are moving to a culture where more of our communities are virtual, where we do more telecommuting, where we keep in touch with people asynchronously by writing blog posts and emails as well as by phone and chat, where people IM each other from across the room with cool articles and gadgets, then what happens to the sharing of music? It’s that much harder, and it would not surprise me if that is a contributing factor the the drop in CD sales and box office earnings. If the only legitimate way to network about these things is to give reviews, a lot of people will write reviews, and you don’t get people attending a new release week after week just to find out if it has potential. I wish that the organizations could instead think about ways to facilitate the conversation instead of acting like viral marketing is just a matter of meting out advertising more slowly.

This is a hard topic, because it’s hard to make the technology uninfringeable and not severely crippled. To me, that is a sign that you need look at social solutions instead, make compliance more enticing (positive reinforcement) instead of punishing every noncompliance so brutally.

One of my friends may be going to SXSW this year. I’m so jealous.

I found it interesting that they target those who originally distibute things on the net instead of just any distributor. This makes me feel easier. As far as coming up with a solution to this problem, time can only tell.

Now that I’m done ranting - I thought I’d mention one other thing. Big business also has to realize that they simply can’t control data the way they used to and be satisfied making the mountains of money they will make once they realize that. Amazon.com LIVES on the long tail - they sell more of obscure items in total than they do of best sellers. If these people realized that if they just made everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) available digitally and at a fair price they would start raking in the dollars again.

I can’t tell you how many times I hear “Well, I can’t buy X online or in any stores so I’ll just go do the bit-torrent thing…”. How much sense does it make to NOT take consumers’ money..?