Then mp3 blogs arose as a ground-up completely distributed user-driven model for taste publishing and music acquisition. They had a series of early instances of driving wild success of unknown bands (Broken Social Scene, Arctic Monkeys, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Arcade Fire, etc), a possibility that was formerly open only to the labels. The labels couldn’t actually sue each blogger — there were simply too many — so they conducted a comprehensive FUD campaign to discourage bloggers from linking to mp3, which has been fairly successful. Simultaneously they have worked to encourage the rise of a small number of highly visible music sites (Pitchfork, et al) which they have worked hard to control via the traditional methods of ad revenue and star access. The result has been the recreation of an online music journalism that looks a lot like its offline counterpart and is hence a relatively poor niche-satisfying discovery engine.

Somewhere in there the iTunes store arose as a very user-friendly interface and captured an enormous portion of the market. It didn’t benefit from any of the network effects of the web, but it did its best to serve users and so it became an incredibly powerful promotion and discovery engine despite its best efforts to the contrary. The labels immediately got scared of Apple’s power over them and so have tried to stand up a whole series of competitors such as the Amazon mp3 store, each their own totally incompatible silo. This has been good for customers in terms of prices and DRM options, but has again eliminated the incredibly powerful networks effects that are what make the web the world’s best tool for getting cultural supply together with demand.

Each of these incidents (and others, such as the Pandora/streaming debacle) has shown the labels choose control and fear of change over the potential distribution, discovery, and money making power of the web. The result has been that while they’ve “won” in the sense that they’ve largely prevented the creation of an online distribution system that would be a competitor for their offline systems, they’ve done it at the cost of utterly poisoning the well: ensuring that music on the web has withered as a market just when so many other digital ecosystems have taken off.

It’s had to argue that an industry that has gone from being enormously profitable to being on the edge of utter bankruptcy in the face of the largest expansion in the consumption of its product in history has done “Awesome”.

I don’t know dude… This one may be a stretch.

Lawsuits have been SOP since at the least the 70’s when I noticed that, all of a sudden, every A&R guy had a law degree. Lawsuit insurance, at that time, was built into recording contracts (at the artist expense of course), replacing budgets for coke and ludes.

The Internet just exposed the ’sue am all’ thing to everybody outside the industry, but they’ve been doing that all along. Meanwhile, lisencing (I’m told) is 66% of the industry anyway.

I’m barely seeing correlation here, leave alone causation.

I’d argue with the specifics. This study is about accessibility, not usability, and it relates to Apple’s strategic decision to keep iTMS out of the browser and use their own client instead.

I’d also argue with holding up Pirate Bay as an example of usability. They could be a lot better. …and they probably *would* be a lot better if they were running high CPM ads from major brands rather than getting junk CPMs from crappy dating servies.

They can’t get major brands because the labels have successfully defined filesharing as scummy. Another example of the success of the Sue Em All campaign.

I beg your pardon but that’s not what some researchers argue:

A study of the accessibility of The Pirate Bay and the iTunes Store

Downloading of music and videos from the Internet has become incredible popular. But can the systems for downloading these files be used by people with disabilities? This paper studies the accessibility of the popular file sharing system The Pirate Bay and the first successful online digital music store, the iTunes Store. The systems are evaluated from the perspective of five fictitious characters that are created with the interaction design tool, Personas. By using the systems in the same way that a user with low vision, blindness, dyslexia, colorblindness, deafness or motor impairments would use them, the strengths and weaknesses in the accessibility of each system is found. The study shows that The Pirate Bay is accessible to a high degree. This is much thanks to a well-considered design and the use of XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets for the user interface. The accessibility of the iTunes Store is poor. One reason for this is because the system is not designed to be used together with assistive technologies such as screen readers and keyboard shortcuts. The paper concludes with a discussion around the found results and how future systems of this type can, and must be accessible to a much higher degree.

People are happy to pay for records and CDs and downloads. RIAA companies could use their marketing departments to make this happen.
The RIAA sue-12-year-old approach is objectionable less because it is a travesty of copyright law than because it is a travesty of
a business model.