Loved the line about the green tea and the earthquake, btw.

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Licensing music for a mixed CD or a compilation or a soundtrack is harder than simply paying for the rights of the music involved. You can’t discount the egos, fiefdoms or the image problems with doing something different or uber-high quality. So, in the example of a mixed CD, filler gets added because two or more competing labels can’t work together. I often think that music should be sold by the artist to the distributor/label on a song by song basis. If it costs them in the sense that a band or an artist has only three saleable singles, that’s all the label should buy off the artist. The digital age practically implores the labels to consider this idea seriously. They’d lose less money if an artist were average and really only had a couple singles in ‘em and that’s all they had to produce as a commodity. That also seems to two-tier the playing field a bit too. And why not? If you’re quality, you get physical media produced in your name. If you’re mediocre, welcome the farm team, iTunes Superstar.

Look at the club music scene. For years vinyl was the only medium and it was ok to concentrate on making a single rock out. Remixes also changed the way a lot of people think about music. And who were some of the first to embrace the changing tide of physical media to data-based media, first with the move to mixing with CDs and then to mp3s.

1) This is nothing new (Magnetic Cassette Tapes and VHS).

and the last time I checked…

2) I’m pretty sure the Personal Computer predated large-scale P2P. Without the PC, you don’t have networks to connect, you don’t have software to encode and hardware to rip with. We’ve all seen their level of success when they’ve attempted to cow big money industries such as PC makers and Electronics manufacturers.

The nature of data is such that most of what is what I call ‘Not Real’, such as video, audio, image, is infinitely malleable. When your customer (audience) knows more about the data than you, the producer, this is what you have to expect is going to happen.

Maybe media isn’t the instabank it has been for many complacent producers, anymore. Maybe the message is work harder, write, produce and present smarter and then consumers will be interested again. We have a LOT of choices out there, why SHOULD I watch yours? Why should I even darken my iPod’s HDD with your artist? Anyone who has looked for anything (especially music) knows that there’s no free lunch. Time is spent, bandwidth squandered. If it was any good to begin with, even a crappy mp3 lets me know I gotta have a better copy of it. My preference is to find the physical CD so as to rip it to my preference, as I am a engineer (audio) myself and I have standards. If I never hear a new artist, I am not likely to buy a disc I don’t know exists. People like me, who abhor the schticky windup and greasy sales pitch, across the board, don’t feel marketed to when browsing torrent sites, or P2P libraries. If something MUST be owned, it will be purchased. But to say that each P2P download has the same value as any other P2P download is erroneous. Or eve that a download is comparable to a physical object is erroneous when directly compared.

I think that your rebuttal was due more to my lack of clarity than any disagreement in principle. I agree that there is no such thing a crime that is “partly victimless”. What I was getting at is the fact that these things have to be taken on a case by case basis. Just like there are many legal ways to approach someone killing another person, based upon circumstances, there should be more than one way to approach the P2P situation.

Equal punishment for equal crimes, but someone downloading an album every month or so isn’t committing the same crime as someone download/seeding thousands of albums daily.