Pigs might fly

Rob at Demonbaby (via ravery and arthole on LJ) has posted a great post about the closure of Oink and from an insider’s perspective what is wrong with the record industry.

I like particularly this line:

I would have gladly paid a large monthly fee for a legal service as good as Oink – but none existed, because the music industry could never set aside their own greed and corporate bullshit to make it happen.

This sums up the problem in a nutshell; the record industry and retailers screwed music lovers (and artists) for years with CDs, they created their own hell by being greedy and expecting people to ‘upgrade’ their collections periodically and pay again and again for the same product, even as costs dropped, made it harder to find new music by conglomeration of media channels owned usually by the same companies, and ignored and did everything to prevent digital distribution until it was inevitable that without legal digital alternatives, politicians would not take severe action against ‘pirates’.

And all that time everyone who loves music wanted something like what Rob suggests – I wasn’t a fan or user of Oink but would use Audiogalaxy as an example…iTunes et al have missed the point made by Rob and in Audiogalaxy – rare tunes or customer requested tunes were given priority; and like all P2P services is user driven not driven by fairly clueless marketing departments trying to restrict you to what they want.

If the industry had allowed and co-operated with a service like that; relinquished some of it’s paranoiac control to a service driven around what music people wanted (fancy that, catering to customers!) rather than ignoring that need and/or criminalising it, then there wouldn’t be a situation that they are stuck between the twin devils of ITunes or P2P. What shocks me is not so much that people want music for free – the Radiohead ‘In Rainbows’ album intentional delivery/leak, crappy bitrate aside is proof of that as a given that some people will see digital music as lesser or free – is that there are still albums and music that is deleted and unavailable in any format.

Given that the usual argument for capitalism is that every niche is supposedly filled; why is this still the case? Why are the archives of the record labels still closed? Why are the charging the same as CDs for much lower quality and less prodution overheads? Why can’t we get the album immediately from the artist without all the expensive marketing hot air to tell us how good it is when we already have these things called ears to tell us that fact?

Given these questions and the lack of co-operation and protectionism of the industry (don’t get me started on DRM) I can’t see how an industry beholden to not giving the consumer what it wants can survive? Constantly telling Peter to not look for the Wolf is only going to last so long…and politicians won’t always give in to their extensive lobbying when mass dissent is already happening.