-Froppo

And I absolutely agree the most power consumers can exert is to simply not buy music from systems they don’t like. (Just last week I discovered one of my favorite artists did a release exclusively on iTMS after years of silence following abuse from RIAA, which is holding an album of hers hostage. I want her new work badly but I didn’t buy it from iTMS. Instead, I sent her an email suggesting cdbaby.com. She said it seemed like a good idea and that she’d look into it. I’m hopeful.)

The problem with discussing many alternatives is that CD isn’t broken. It continues to deliver the value to consumers it was designed to deliver. If anything has broken, it’s the RIAA business model. The fact that RIAA believes that CD has evolved from the goose that laid the golden egg to the albatross around RIAA’s neck over the span of 20 years is merely irony, not justification to invent or adopt a new format. We should be careful not to invest too much effort in helping re-imagine the business model of a system which does not serve the interests of the vast majority of artists who affiliate with it.

more importantly, as you say: >they make us feel less and less like we own the music we buy. their only hope is to maintain the psychological link in the consumers mind between downloading some data and buying an object, and yet they undermine that at every turn by making the downloaded thing feel transient, conditional, and un-owned.

they are so on the way out, and through greed: it’s a total modern morality tale.

Seems to me that the people screaming loudest about the so called evils of DRM have never been working musicians or been involved in running an indie label.

Also I’m about as locked in to iTunes as I am to a wet paper bag. Stop it with the hyperbole already.

It doesnt help at all when asshats like Cory Doctorow advocate downloading music from the filesharing networks instead of buying it.

Even if those people are right about some points, the

And CDs still vastly outsell online distribution, again, without DRM. Since consumers seem largely uninterested in new music formats for retail distribution, partly because of the majors attempt to cripple them with DRM, that means the #1 music distribution system, too, has no DRM. Ripping that music is now faster than ever.

So, really, all this talk about DRM is focusing on a tiny, tiny sliver of the market. I’m sure the labels would love to make that 100% of the music we consume, but that’s a long, long way away. And in fact, while record labels think that most music on portable players is pirated, I think it’s more likely that people are ripping a lot of that from their CD collections.

There’s plenty of room to talk about alternative distribution. And given entirely unexplored frontiers of music consumption online, musicians would do well to consider avoiding the majors altogether if it makes sense for them.