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No kiddingNo kiddingPosted Dec 15, 2005 8:07 UTC (Thu) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385)In reply to: No kidding by jeaton Parent article: GStreamer to support DRM
"the recording industry really IS being impacted financially by people ripping and copying their music from CDs"
That is most likely true. Some data suggests the impact is a positive one for some parts of the industry, but whether positive or negative it's extremely unlikely to be exactly zero.
The recording industry seems to be suffering as much if not more from their own paranoia and bad business decisions than from illegal redistribution (note that ripping and copying per se have no financial impact on the recording industry whatsoever unless there is also distribution).
People who don't buy CD's today are basically the same people who weren't buying CD's ten years ago--they still listen to music, but now they can listen to music more easily, reliably, and with higher audio quality than ever before. If we magically made it impossible for these people to listen to music without purchasing a CD, they wouldn't listen to music at all, or they'd revert to some technologically backward behavior like singing to each other. About the only way the recording industry is going to extract money from these people is if they get a grant from the government.
New artists are adapting to changes in their environment. Signing up with a major record label is fairly far down the list of likely outcomes even at the best of times, but now one could get oneself featured in a game or TV commercial soundtrack, or run a website with a PayPal donate button to cover studio expenses without intending to make a living from music performance.
Why pay tens of thousands when a cheap laptop, some specialized audio gear (which you can often rent), and a web site or a popular blog is all you need to reach a worldwide audience? This is the *real* threat to the recording industry--not that individual consumers will rip off artists, but that the artists and consumers will figure out that they only need each other, and stop signing contracts with the recording industry.
This is why DRM targets media player vendors, and why consumer electronics vendors find DRM so fascinating. DRM prevents consumers and artists from connecting with each other without the approval of a third party. A widely deployed DRM system can put the recording industry under the control of the DRM systems vendor, at which point the recording industry is pretty much irrelevant--the recording industry will still carry all the risk, but the DRM system can raise fees or pull the plug any time the industry doesn't contribute enough back to the DRM system vendor.
Assuming we are not all forced to implement DRM, most good artists are not really going to notice when the recording industry implodes (or at least drastically restructures itself to cope with reality). By that time the artists will know where the audience is and have the technical means to reach them, and vice versa, so the benefits that a traditional recording industry can provide just won't matter any more. The recording industry is not going to go away, but it is going to have to change quite a bit to focus on the remaining useful things it does do well. One of the first things the industry has to do is stop trying to accelerate its own destruction with DRM...
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