"The music industry is not going to win this, because, like alcohol during Prohibition and satellite TV in heartland, millions of people want it. And when you have a market that size, especially young people, it will be served, legally or through a black market.
The music industry doesn't seem to get this, but apparently believes that through litigation it can hold back the tide and maintain its wildly lucrative status quo. It's not going to happen. Technology keeps moving forward.
And it's not going to stop at music either. Already places like Morpheus are offering movie files, including first runs like Spiderman. These are pretty crude , mostly filmed off a mallplex screen, but you can see the future roaring down the tracks.
One of these days the black market will figure out how to monetize this process, and the music industry and Hollywood (and books and magazines and pay-per-view TV and computer games) will find itself under assault by thieves and hijackers. And it'll be real easy to divert the movie of the future as it is being wirelessly transmitted in digital to the local moviehouse.
The answer, the one the entertainment industry doesn't want to face, is to embrace this technology revolution. It means beating the Napsters and Morpheii (and not the current half-assed industry alternative) at their own game.
By that, I mean putting the entire catalogue, including new releases, online. Put them on in higher quality and with faster download speeds (through compression, etc.) than anything out there right now....
Whatever the amount, a new payment system has to be put into place. The pieces are already there — online micropayments, debit cards for young people, security passwords for security, but no one has put them all together.
A hundred million dollars and a task force of financial institutions, online service providers and entertainment executives ought to be able to iron out standards in six months and have the system in beta in 18....
Meanwhile, the music industry could go back to doing its real job: finding and developing talented, less-predictable, new bands. And who knows, perhaps Hollywood could even start taking risks again....
If the music industry won't create this new industry, then the pirates will. And, after a decent interval, the pirates will be rehabilitated as the new establishment." [ABCNews commentary]
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