Recording industry plays the same old tune

[DaBees-Knees]

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=121497&pn=3

Perhaps no other industry has missed more tech opportunities than the music business.

In 1999, Shawn Fanning's Napster made it incredibly easy for people to share music online. The record companies reacted by suing Napster for contributing to copyright infringement.

Then-Napster CEO Hank Barry called for the music industry to adopt a radio-style licensing agreement that paid royalties to artists for music distributed via the net. His calls fell on deaf ears.

Napster fans quickly moved on to other peer-to-peer file-sharing networks such as Gnutella and Grokster, and music ‘pirates' became the RIAA's public enemy number one.

In 2000 MP3.com launched a service that allowed members to upload songs from their own private CD collection and stream them to any PC. The recording industry sued MP3.com for copyright infringement and eventually won. MP3.com was sold and changed business models. Add to all that the RIAA's suits against Grokster, Morpheus, Kazaa, and some 30,000-odd music 'pirates'. Talk about your broken records.

Today, of course, music-subscription businesses and streaming services dominate digital music. Had the record companies partnered with Napster, MP3.com, or any of the other file-sharing networks instead of suing them, they might control digital music sales today - without nearly as many problems with piracy.

When greed sets in logic goes out of the window.