mp3 madness?
I remember way back in the days of the napster wars, hearing an argument in favor of napster saying that CD sales had gone up since it had been around. I was a little skeptical of this since I knew more then a few people who had boasted to have not bought a CD in over a year since they had been downloading everything they wanted. Now we're starting to see some backlash from all that. John Robb's Radio Weblog points to a few articles about this. The one paragraph in particular struck me:
In Germany alone, one survey by market researcher GfK found that blank CD sales jumped 129 percent this year. Purchases of pre-recorded music dropped 2.2 percent in the same period. Indeed, blank CDs now outsell recorded discs in Europe and Canada, according to one label executive.
Now I am sure at least a good sized chunk of these sales are due to blank CDs being so cheap and CD burners now showing up on everyone's computer. I bet even my parents will start using CDs for backups soon. The thing that disturbs me more about all this is the solutions they are coming up with. I get annoyed with the record industry more all the time, but now they are running scared, which means the consumer gets screwed. Htheir been any other kinds of format changes like this that force users to possibly buy new equipment just to use a technology they've been using for a while already. Television isn't the same because when color came along it didn't prevent people with b&w TVs from watching TV, they just didn't experience the same thing.
The other questions in my head are: did we create this situation ourselves? Are the record companies the only ones who are at fault? Could there have been some kind of solution between the recording industry and places like napster that would have solved this better? And how will this all shake out?
