Silence is not always golden

Thank you to New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow for his piece on the self-destruction of the record industry. It’s quite possibly one of the most truthful assessments to come out. It’s fairly well thought-out, and simply put, although he gets one thing wrong and skips one important point.

Piracy’s impact has been fairly minor. The RIAA’s numbers for Napster — the basis for this whole frothy kerfuffle — only applied to brick and mortar album sales, and actually mathematically correspond with the adherence to Amazon. Napster’s user base was too small at the beginning of 1999 to have made a serious dent unless sneaky little college kids somehow made their tiny apartments into mass distros.

The RIAA, as a group. has been so focused on enforcing what’s legal based on 1998 standards that streaming and podcasting from sites other than Last.fm, Radio Paradise, Pandora, etc. have become popular forms of music consumption in lieu of purchasing it on CD. We appear headed, as a world, toward a business model of mostly renting our media — an effort spearheaded by large industry lobbies, including the Authors’ Guild, the Motion Picture Association of America and, you guessed it, the RIAA.

Paying money to bring a CD to the CD player of your choice only grants you the right to play the music and possess the disc it’s stored on; you don’t actually own anything. That’s why I am struggling to find sympathy for the record industry because now, other forms of music rental, like listening on a band’s MySpace page, which the RIAA pushed for, have taken hold. There’s just not a lot of money in it, because this system of info rental is now dependent on dwindling online ad sales. Instead of developing other business models, the book, movie and record industries have tried to force us to comply with a clunky ball and chain that doesn’t make sense in the current decade.

I do think there is cause for some sympathy, though. If our information and entertainment industries tanked, I’m not sure we as a society would take it very well. Imagine a handful of years where very little comes out other than syndicated re-runs and only the top of the pops (I’m looking at you, Britney) hit the airwaves. Many of us would collapse into the insular worlds provided by static playlists on our iPods which, even with 23 days’ worth of tracks, still get old after awhile.

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