The Internet Debacle - An Alternate View

[TankGirl]

A good post, John.

Originally posted by JohnDoe345
There definately needs to be a change in the industry, but I believe that half of the effort has to be met with the artists themselves branching out on their own rather then relying on record labels. I don't claim to know the whole process of the music industry, but I believe that record labels will only continue to exploit artists, demand consumers to buy overpriced albums, and continue to with their efforts to ban p2p programs....if the artists don't take a stand on this issue themselves. If the majority of artist themselves are for file sharing then what arguements do the music industry really have....except that they are just greedy and want full control over the music industry.

P2P for the masses is barely 2 years old. The technology has evolved so far mainly in the mechanics of sharing, searching and downloading. Some elementary social functionality has been introduced (hotlists, browsing, personal messaging and chatrooms) to allow group formation among content-seeking peers. These features are fine in themselves but they offer no good tools for an artist to promote his/her work. Artists and p2p developers are just starting to find each other - and this fertile romance the RIAA would like to prevent at all costs. P2P already provides a superior distribution system compared to what the RIAA has to offer. When the social p2p tools evolve into a level where an artist can organize a global promotion campaign at no costs from his/her home computer and actually reach a great number of interested people - who will need the RIAA then for anything?

- tg