Death To The Record Industry

The Problem

Every Saturday, I watch 'The Chart Show'. It's the only pop programme that I can stomach. Mainly because it doesn't have a load of patronsing, brainless tossers with mid-atlantic accents presenting it. Every week, the programme consists of the following:

• One chewn/video I like
• Two I hate to the point of violence
• One song that's bland but has a good video
• A load of generic shit that you can (if you were mad) buy by the yard

The record, which is on every video show, yoof programme, radio show and on every advert for forthcoming compilation albums isn't 'released' yet. In fact, under some circumstances, the record can be in the shop-assistants hand which they are waving under your nose in a tantalizing way, but due to 'not being released yet' they cant sell it to me. Why ?

The reason for this bizarre behavior is of course Marketing. By teasing the public with the record for weeks before they actually allow them to buy it, they ensure a demand is created. This demand, coupled with a well publicized release date ensures that come the day of 'release', thousands of starved, rabid sadsters will rush to their local record shop and buy all copies on day one, causing an instant hit.

Luckily for the record industry, they need not concern themselves with fears of missing out on the initial sales from the exposure weeks before, because its not money from sales that they're after, particularly not single sales. What they want is a hit, because with a hit comes exposure and with exposure comes more ways of making money with album sales, merchandising and PAs. Throughout the industry the coke-snorting, superficial employees refer to the music as 'product'. Again, I bow to the levels of cynicism rife in this industry and salute the lord-god of cynical record industry bastards, Pete Waterman (Hallowed be thy name) who recognised what bollocks the whole thing was and managed to make a million from it in the eighties.

Why does this bother me ? Because I like music, and I hate being subject to this marketing bullshit when I want to buy some. If you are looking for further reasons to hate the record industry's unique form of cynicism here is a list:
 

• The Spice Girls
• Celine Dion
• B*witched
• FIVE
• Boyzone
• Billie

The Solution

MP3 and Ogg Vorbis allow near-cd quality digital recordings of music, in a super-compressed form which can easily be traded over the Internet, thus making everyone involved in the record industries lose out. In case you think I exaggerate about the threat which these pose to the industry, just have a look at the extreme efforts to which they are going in stopping these wonderful files being propagated. Altavista has hundreds upon hundreds of dead MP3 links, which are slowly being stamped on by poor underpaid tossers at the big companies, whose job it is to get sites closed down by threatening their ISPs with legal action. They sit, day after day looking for MP3 versions of their copyrighted material in an attempt to hammer the culprit. In fact, due to the keywords in the header of this page there will almost certainly be some of these people reading this page now. Hello! You'll soon be out of a job, hope you can program in C++!

But, they're not that good. The Internet is too powerful a medium. If you look hard enough you will see pretty much any song you want somewhere in the world wherever there is someone with a CD player and an MP3/Vorbis encoder. They cant stop it.

I would never condone breaking any law, especially copyright law, for which I have particular respect. But if I didn't feel this way then I would set about Ogging up all of my CDs, and trading encrypted copies across the internet by news groups and email. I would also try to use systems to stop search engines showing they up, like pasworded web-sites and 'alternative' systems such as Napster, Gnutella and hotline.

The world is changing. Change with it.