In the seemingly prehistoric past, the enterprise of producing anddistributing music was a truly bearing hassle. We have seen in the recentcentury the rise of a fairly complex arrangement of firms which have worked toproduce package and distribute artists’ talents to willing consumers. Before music could be send via electronic mail, it was necessary to embed soundonto a physical device and ship it about to those stores who could sell it, alltogether a difficult trail. So began the recording industry with itsimportant imperative to mass-produce musical media and it was necessarily proppedup with a substantial portion of the effective price of music sales and a manner of legal crutches.
Yet the world has changed. The traditional yet convoluted means ofporting around disks embedded with music has now been superseded in terms ofspeed and economy by the methods of digital distribution. In fact if oneasks the recording industry, the facility of music distribution is too extreme;it is too easy to pass about, and more prominently too easy to seamlessly copy the itemswhich had been represented in the past by physical items.
But after the blooming of digital distribution, the classic base ofincome of the physical distributors of music has fallen flat if notfurther. Current copyright standards are indeed still firmly in the favor ofthe recording industry; under the law as interpreted in the past, they indeedhold rights to digital media despite how easy and painless they are to multiplyand distribute.
Yet looking at solely practicalities, people often realize that this state of affairsis indefensible for the consumer. The mandate of the recording industry, tocreate and distribute, has expired. It is now entirely obsolete. Theformer function of distribution is no longer necessary as technologicaladvancement has managed to innovate a superior, digital manner of musicalmovement. Why then, should the defunct and moribund purveyors of physicalmedia be rewarded with further royalties? The purpose of such royalties was to support an industry which wasnecessary but could not function alone but it no longer is needed.
In public affairs, the RIAA makes public the precise value of revenue whichthey predict to have lost due to the prevalence of online exchange. Of course for the RIAA to make such estimates, they must pretend that music consumption is perfectly inelastic as well; that is they must assume that if people actually had to pay for all the music they listen to, they would not have listened to any less, an idea that show considerable economic ignorance on the part of the corporate sob-story. Even if these kinds of estimates were somehow accurate, it might seem heartbreaking to some, but notmore so than a turn-of-the-twentieth carriage company lamenting the coming ofmotor vehicles as robbing them of their traditional consumers. Record recording, manufacturing anddissemination can no longer be a target of empathy as the further usage of suchmean denotes economic waste in a world where such change is effectively freewithout.
So ironically in its last throes, the recoding industry is undoing theirformer economic niche; instead of attempting to find new ways to effectivelydistribute their goods, their assumed economic function is to deliberatelystifle distribution and make music as difficult to come by and expensive aspossible. They now only manufacturescarcity in a market which should no longer exist. They disable DVD players and the like of dataexchange, trace online movement and copying of files, and simply file lawsuitsat all venues which can more economically perform their original economic imperative.
The argument which they have now produced is that, regardless of public goodand their earlier functions, they have a nebulous right to billions of lines ofbinary filling of terabytes of music data. Their support for copyrights does not stem from public practicality, butthe moralistic idea that the traditional distributors should maintain their positionregardless of how obsolete they might become which climbs obvious out ofparasitic self-interest.
Patents exist to secure a stipend for inventors who create good thatcontribute to the public good. The factthat pop music is now deified to the status of the steam engine should mean thattheir creators have the same institutional allowances. Despite how entitled artists or distributors mayfeel about their work, they are yet to make any tangible contribution tosociety. The American constitutionestablishes rights over “Writings and Discoveries” for the sake of the “Sciencesand useful Arts.” Note thatconstitutionally speaking, in order to receive a patent for your artwork, ithas to actually be useful, not just How toDismantle and Atomic Bomb.
Recording companies have indeed fulfilled a historical purpose, yet now the capitalnecessary to produce and distribute their old goods have become commonly accessible. It no longer takes a multi-million dollarstudio to record a band, singer or rapper. Children don’t need inflated economic incentives far off in the futureto want to spend their savings to buy instruments and play and record withtheir friends. Any child in the worldcan download a free beat synthesizer, buy a cheap microphone at Wal-Mart andbecome a rapper. All these artistic worksneed simply to jump onto the Internet to be subject to public judgment. There's no further reason that the public’smoney should endlessly support the companies which formerly supplied the nowabundant. The day of the classical record deal and the coming musical of age which is "selling-out" for a band is no longer even necessary for musicians to be successful.