About Time:
Major music labels Sony and Universal Music have significantly relaxed their stance on digital music distribution, allowing customers the right to burn music on to blank CD’s and lowering the price of songs to 99 cents a pop. This a very big victory for consumers, music lovers and those who knew all along that policing demand instead of embracing it and treating your customers like the enemy is very poor business practise. Hopefully the others will follow suit.
Though I’ve been known to engager in an occassional music download myself (*wink*), I don’t want to give the impression that it should be one giant free-for-all with no one having to pay for anything. Artists need compensation and independent record stores are in many cases the last guardians of musical diversity in an increasingly consolidated music world. But it’s too late to go back to the way it was. Shouldn’t this titanic shift in the way music is distributed be seen as an opportunity instead of the end of the world?