The Recording Industry is Trying to Kill the Goose That Lays the Golden Egg

From Jim: Dan Bricklin has written a great piece dissecting the stats on album sales declines and pointing how file-sharing may not be the cause. (act surprised.)

I only read the first quarter or so, but this is really good stuff. I wonder if the people at RIAA are a bunch of stupid ignorant morons or if they know all this stuff, but just ignore it while fighting themselves to death my making it harder and harder for people to find new music. Hmn, I guess that means they are a bunch of stupid ignorant morons either case. Tough for them!

As David Bowie said a while ago in New York Times (David Bowie, 21st-Century Entrepreneur, free registration required, yak yak yak):

“I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. [....] it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”

I'm not sure it'll be that bad for the artists though. If they only get a dollar or two per sold album now, then that's not more than people will be more than willing to pay. Add a few bucks for the distribution cost and it's still a lot better than the $13-$17 they are making us pay now!

The recording industry is going bye bye even faster than the telecon industry is.