Major Labels v. Backbones

Sun Aug 18 15:38:27 UTC 2002

On Sun, 18 Aug 2002 11:36:32 +0300
 Petri Helenius <pete at he.iki.fi> wrote:
> 
> Tim Thorne wrote:
> > 
> > They'd probably end up filing suit for that too. I don't believe that
> > will affect them much. The whole music industry seems to be running
> > scared of new media. They obviously like the revenue from album sales
> > and figure that if people buy only a couple of mp3s tracks they will
> > earn less revenue. Try and buy an mp3 of something from Sony:
> > 
> > http://usa.sonymusic.com/music/catalog.html
> > 
> > File sharing will continue until the recording industry gives people
> > what they want. It is not about piracy, its about convenience.
> > 
> How do you classify Pressplay in this view?
> 
> Pete

Pretty lame. They have only 3 of the 5 "majors", and various restrictions on
what you can do, how you can copy downloaded files, etc. See

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2002/tc20020812_4809.htm

for a description of how things stand.

Note that pressplay and the other paid services
have together maybe 100,000 customers - about 2 to 3 orders of magntitude below
the free services.

Please remember that the music business is one where bullying and hard ball
tactics are routine. They _will_ try to bully ISP's, and, BTW, they
_will_ monitor this list and bring e-mails posted to this list up in court if it
suits them. 
In my opinion, it is not until the rear-guard action to stop the use of
new technology has failed, and has seen to have failed, that things will
improve. This has not happened yet, and things are likely to get uglier and
nastier until it does.

Regards
Marshall Eubanks