Tuesday, May 24, 2005

One more reason to scratch my head

Here's what's wrong with the music industry today:

Never mind the fact that downloading copyrighted music in mp3 (poor representations of much better recordings) format is illegal. Never mind that Cable/Satellite music providers don't publish play lists because they have been convinced by the industry that it will promote more illegal downloads. The music industry has made it illegal for me to promote their product for them.

Podcasts being what they are today - the next generation of radio, by the people, for the people - I want to set up a podcast whereby I would talk about artists you may not have heard before with a few clips of their music thrown in for a little sample. Kinda like an audio version of my "If I had my own radio station" posts, but with the added advantage of getting to actually hear some of the material. We're talking clips of audio here, not entire songs. Believe it or not - all the legal experts I've spoken to on the subject conclude that this would still be infringement of copyright law.

Unfortunately, because I'm telling you about artists I think you should try - but I can't give you a little listen to their stuff, the only way to sample their music would be to download a few illegal mp3 files. So by making it illegal to promote artists I think you should listen to (for free), the music industry has effectively made mp3 sharing the only practical method of sampling music you wouldn't hear on the radio. How ironic......

2 comments:

Karl Plesz said...

Yeah, I hear ya. To be honest, it's not that I'm not interested in promoting indie artists - it's that there are already a bajillion bloggers doing that already - people who are much more in tune with the indie movement in the first place.

For me it's simple - I know what I like and I'd like to introduce it to you too. I'm not talking about artists that already get airplay on radio (which means they're probably not making bajillions of dollars).

Karl Plesz said...

I'm speechless.