Well, the major record industry has shown its complete impotence in the face of rapidly changing musical technology and are now in court asserting that buying a CD and copying it to your own PC for personal use is an indictable offense and one which they will prosecute.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/28/AR2007122800693.html?hpid=topnews
It is no secret that the major record labels are crumbling before our eyes. Employees are being laid off in their thousands, shareholders are squealing like petulant piglets and their human commodities, the musicians are sitting on the sidelines wide-eyed.
I have never been an exponent of illegal downloading of music, though its inevitability should by now have produced some remodelling to the record companies business plan. The major record companies have since the mid-seventies been fat dinosaurs, belching as they sat on the bodies of the musicians used and money earned.
Things have changed. Small companies are finding their niche, and have reacted quickly to soak up the slack left in the trail of the lumbering dinosaurs. Musicians are taking matters into their own hands. I was speaking with a well know UK musician recently and he dumped his record company a few years ago in favor of his own label, his own marketing and his own creative direction. As he said, "The best thing I did was get out of the music business and into the ******(insert his name) business".
The days of Geffen, Artegun etc. are clearly bygone, not that the companies have caught on to this fact yet! Now the fragmented industry has exciting prospects but the record companies will not survive unless they adapt. Perhaps they do not deserve to survive, but one thing is sure and that is that they are poor losers.
If you want to see why the major record companies will fail in their lawsuits, one only need to look at the image below. How many of us remember this? Home taping is killing music?...lol. Just like copying your CD onto your PC.
HS