It doesn't happen very often, but when it does it sure feels good.
I just finished reading an article on the record industry. It talks about how they are almost 50% down in sales from their peak 8 years ago!
It also goes on to quote many industry insiders who FINALLY admit they screwed up when dealing with Napster. Instead of suing them and disbursing all those users to hundreds of smaller peer-to-peer networks they admit now they should have worked with napster to become a legitimate, fair-priced service.
EVEN HILARY ROSEN, the music industries very own version of the anti-Christ (no longer head of the RIAA) is seeing the light and acknowledging fear and greed led the industry to essentially sign it's own death warrant.
On the positive side, in a last desperate grab to save themselves they're beginning to come around.
A site they started last year called LaLa.com is pretty cool. You can listen to any song from their catalog completely free! They hope you'll pay for the download if you decide you like the song.
I checked out the site and it's pretty cool You can try it yourself at...
THat's what blows my mind Web. And you see it with a lot of industries. They're SO tied to the old way of doing things they seem to not recognize the reality of a changing marketplace. The record industry is just going to continue to crumble. Every single year another huge batch of CD buyers die off and are replaced with a new wave of youngsters that know nothing other than digital downloading.
What really kills me is I remember PRESSPLAY and MUSICNET, the record companies "answers" to Napster the year after they shut them down.
First of all, the six companies were split between the two sites, so you had to be a member of both. Secondly, those bastages were trying to charge $2.99 to $3.49 for a single download! MORE THAN A PHYSICAL SINGLE at the time!
