Carving 'P2P' onto a Record Executive's forehead

(pic. The Record Industry, yesterday)

The song playing is 'Blue Flowers' by Dr. Octagon.

To summarise this story on Wired.com: "Record companies...scared of file sharing... record companies think of new ways to make people pay for music."
A total of two sentances are devoted to the most important question: why am I going to pay to download music when I can get it for free?
Ever since Napster first appeared there has been talk of free 'n' legal downloading services, and now we have iTunes and the Nuetered Napster. Now, as Wired's article states these services sold 330 Million MP3s last year. That means that every few seconds somebody out there made a choice between paying money for something or getting it for free... and chose to pay money. That said, 5 billion illegal MP3s were downloaded, and 5 billion is a much bigger number than 330 Million, meaning that legal downloaders are in a minority, like paedophiles and ladies who live with fifty cats.
Record companies need to understand that it is not in their customers best interests to pay for things. Spending money on something that can be yours for free makes no s-s-s-sense. Getting something for nothing happens every day: it's called 'outsourcing', a term for when a the costs from a transaction between two parties (two people file-sharing) is picked up by a third party, which in this case is the record companies. In most cases of outsourcing the third party is the taxpayer (a company pollutes a river and the government cleans it up) so I'm crying a big fuckin' river when those losing out are billion-dollar corporations.
This Wired article (which reached them by way of the Associated Press, meaning its essentially advertising disguised as news circulated by PR firms.) goes on to talk about how Shawn Fanning, the guy who invented Napster, is building a wonderful new piece of software called 'Mashboxx' (because, y'know, The Kids have these like 'raves' called 'mash-ups' and the extra X means it could be porn). The idea is to let record companies deicde on the usage of their songs -their billions of songs- and to let people share concert bootlegs. Now, y'see, I've only got one concert bootleg, it's Dillinger Escape Plan covering a Justin Timberlake song, or half of it is becuase most of the track is taken up by a girl trying to explain the song to her friend: "IT'S JUSTIN! JUST- NO IT'S JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE! TIMBERLAKE! THEY'RE DOING A JUST- WELL BECAUSE IT'S FUNNY OR SOMETHING!". I really can't see this catching on.
Let's go right back to the start: do you want to know how I first discovered the original Napster way back in the day? Well, I read an Associated Press article explaining how record companies were losing money to this trendy new fad but help was on the way from legitimate downloading sites where our Bizarro-selves could pay for songs. And -ohboyohboyohboy- Microsoft is planning to integrate File-sharing software into windows! You know what web-browser I'm using? Not Explorer- but Firefox. You know where my music is coming from? Media Player? Nope, Winamp. Microsoft products are usually in the space between turning a new computer on for the first time and dowloading a better version.
File-sharing isn't going to stop. Wanna know what I did when Napster got busted? I moved onto Audiogalaxy. When that was shut down? I moved into a very long and profitable relationship with Soulseek, whose little blue bird is perched in my system tray as we speak. See a pattern emerging? Every time a P2P system is shut down a bigger and better one takes its place. On Napster I downloading single tracks, with Soulseek I can get whole albums just as easily.
My only advice to the record industry is to give up. Maybe -and this is a crazy, far out idea- if you stop paying Associated Press to write articles on what a terrible threat is posed by Soulseek et al. then maybe you might jsut skim a couple of percent off the number of people downloading. Without the constant press attention P2P would go the way of FTP servers.
I'm Just sayin'.