Dinosaurs

It doesn't surprise me that the music industry is hurting. You just have to take a look at who are running the RIANZ. These guys don't make music, they make money, and lately their stock is falling. So, guess what do the these type of guys do do when they see their cash cow slip though their oily grasp? They legislate.

There is a young woman in spectacles and an orange wig dancing around her bedroom doing an out-of-tune spoof of the song "YMCA", complete with arm-waving and expletive-riddled lyrics. Nothing out of the ordinary there, then, because of course, this is YouTube.

The song is actually pretty funny, and decent satire.

It's called "DMCA", after the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the US law that enshrines some of the rules websites such as YouTube must abide by if they don't want to get sued by the owners of copyrighted material posted by their users.

Viacom has launched a $1bn claim for damages over all those copyrighted clips, 150,000 of them, watched over 1.5 billion times, according to its lawsuit.

The problem here is a distinct lack of innovation. Anyone who visits this site cant help but notice all the Youtube clips. Here I share my musical tastes with others. I broadcast my love of music to those who drop by, and if people who come here are interested in an artist, maybe they'll go out and buy a CD or two: except in increasing numbers - they don't.

More and more people are bypassing the CD shops at the mall in favour of iTunes or downloads from their mobile phones. You know it's time to get out of the music retail business when The Warehouse is New Zealands biggest physical seller of CD's, and the largest digital download source in New Zealand is Vodafone New Zealand.
The final step in this mess has to be the eradication of the middle man, whose love of music seems not so much in its creation, but more with its destruction. The sooner artists bypass the recording companies, and fast track their music to digital downloaders, the sooner we wont have to worry about buying a platter of aluminium that costs up to $32 dollars - especially when that platter costs less than $2 to make and box.
So in the end we lose and the artists lose.
Support Youtube - advertise the music, share music with your friends, in the hope that it won't die out entirely on the world stage. By putting the music back into the hands of the fans, we can truly listen to what we want to, rather than to what's on some radio stations play list. And that's an innovation I'd love to champion.