Comical lesson to be learned by RIAA battles

The author of this article or commentary makes a few good points. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned here. We can only hope. We think technology is good, the record industry thinks it's bad. This author says it's neither, it is an event. Technology doesn't care what happens, it's indifferent to our points of view. He's right.

The Recording Industry Association of America did everything it could to stop digital music, from suing the makers of MP3 software to trying to get injunctions against portable players to corrupting their CDs, rendering them slightly more difficult to transcode and impossible to play on many CD decks. The RIAA refused to play the tape to the very end and see the whole picture. Let's not be naive: one of the biggest draws of digital music was that it used to be trivially easy to illegally download albums free. But if the RIAA had put that aside for a moment, they'd have taken away a number of valuable lessons. With the cost of CDs rising to a disc, users now prefer to sample before they buy, and the best way to take a customer who traditionally only buys rock and pop and sell them boatloads of hip-hop, soul and jazz is to give them the opportunity to find the connections on their own. The recording industry would also have learned that its customers are young and unafraid of technology, and they appreciate that interacting with your music as a folder on your hard drive has advantages over interacting with them in a 300-CD rack in the corner of the living room.

Read the whole article, it's good. I especially like the authors summation of the situation. He says you can look at the whole picture, enjoy both the good and the bad, or you can wear blinders. Refuse to accept the technology and simply suffer the drawbacks. Now, what in your opinion is the RIAA doing in this situation? That's right, they are suffering, they are suffering a lot more in the whole picture than their embattled customer base. Sure, a small percentage get's dragged into court, but a vast majority continues to embrace the future. Meanwhile, the entire music industry feels the negatives. Go ahead with your master plan RIAA, grab your buggy whips and take a stance against the entire world. Let's see how long you can keep it up. Meantime, we will alll enjoy what technology can provide us and have fun tearing down your DRM annoyances.

Source: Chicago Sun times