I lived through the first punk revolution in ‘76. And I worked in a studio in the early 80s. I well remember the explosion of creativity as people discovered they could self publish. For a brief while there were hundreds of indy labels and thousands of people doing short run pressings in the UK. Of course, most of those bands sank without trace and the indy labels got swallowed up. It really is time to do this again and disintermediate the big cartel. This time around the small labels can keep going and make a real run at it with pure internet pr, marketing and distribution. What’s needed is for the middle aggregators like Amazon to support them along with the search engines and information aggregators like last.fm

People exploring musical tastes are just what the RIAA fears the most. One of the first observations made by original Napster shortly after starting, was the majority of songs being traded were not songs the music industry (RIAA) had any interest in.

Times have changed and people want choices even if they have to pay for radio (sirrus) to get it. How many kids would really buy what they download, i.e. have the extra $5k to fill up their Ipods with purchased music? The mp3 player has the P2P network to thank for it’s success – another shot in the arm for creativity and innovation. That’s also why music stores RIAA develop haven’t got a chance as long as they promote a very narrow, limited musical range – and highly doubtful that is what they will voluntarly change.

I doubt if RIAA will ever offer the musician much more than $0.10 on the dollar.

I can’t think of an industry that works so hard against giving the customer what they want. P2P is only one part of the growing “music underground”.

The RIAA has already lost. The numbers tell the story. The more aggressive RIAA becomes, the more downloading becomes symbolic.

One of these days, I’ll tell you whom I once worked for

Morg