No matter how hard the RIA tries to put an end to online music piracy, the truth is that the RIA has accomplished nothing. Internet piracy is just a symptom of a more serious problem. That more serious problem is that technology itself has advanced to the point where the RIA and the courts can not keep up with the overwhelming number of violations happening every second of every day. Any child can take a CD, put it in their computer, copy it, and distribute it to hundreds of thousands of people across the Internet in the matter of seconds. The hope of the RIA and the courts is that if they make examples of enough people at the hands of the law, then maybe people will be scared enough to stop pirating music online. Yeah, fat chance! All that is doing is provoking people to pirate music more and more out of spite. The bottom line is that the average person does not like it when an organization like the RIA leans on the court system in an attempt to bully people with the law. And the simple fact is that there are just not enough resources available to keep the problem at bay.
Technology messes with the industry in other key ways. In past decades, it used to be that you had to trade in your records for 8-Track tapes, your 8-Track tapes for cassettes, and your Cassettes for CD’s. The music industry was able to rake in billions every time you shelled out hundreds of dollars to rebuy your music library on the latest storage devices. Now, with everything digital and the ability to store thousands of songs on one or two high memory capacity storage devices cheaply, the need to purchase your music library over and over again every decade or so is simply no longer necessary.
To make matters worse, many bands do their own recording, mixing, mastering, and out source labeling and packaging for pennies on the dollar. Thus making major studios and recording labels more and more irrelevant with every passing day. Then many of these bands give their CD’s away for free, making it harder for established major label bands to sell their music at the high prices they got by on just a few years ago. It is our easy access to highly useful technology that has made all this possible. Unfortunately, it is this same technology that is making the business model the music industry has relied on in previous decades as obsolete as black and white television.
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