To the Record Labels

You people are so far out of tune with the times, it is sickening. You are the only industry (if you can be called an industry - in recent times you have been reduced to what is essentially a law firm) that has deliberately and gladly made enemies of your own customers. You want to sue the hell out of the people who made you rich. You think you can solve your problem with lawyers and legal systems. Your imaginary -- er I meant intellectual -- property rights are all you are clinging to and you are failing miserably. Why not get in tune with the times? You simply cannot get around the inherent benefits of digital media, but you idiots simply cannot get this fact through your heads. Because, if you could, you would have thought of innovative ways to take advantage of the digital revolution like any other successful company. Instead, you imbiciles have fought tooth and nail against the tide and have been swimming up river ever since the digital revolution began, because it caught you with your pants down like a deer in the headlights. You never expected that your iron grip on the music industry and godlike powers of decided who and what gets published would ever come to an end, and now you are running scared like a dog with its tail between its legs. If you had your way, you would squeeze as much money as you could out of every single customer. I'm sure your think tanks right now are trying to figure out how to charge someone to listen to a single song one time at a rate of 5 cents per listen. After all, it is your property. It is not the property of the user who paid for the song. We should all pay you for the privilege to listen. Thank you, thank you soooooo much!

The fact is that more and more your DRM attemps are failing as people realize how much it sucks not to be able to use something that they paid for in the manner they choose to use it. The recent Yahoo! fiasco ring any bells? Their DRM servers are shutting down, so all of the customers who used Yahoo!'s service are SOL when it comes to all of the music they "purchased". Without the servers running to unlock "their" songs, these people cannot even listen to the music they paid for. Thankfully Yahoo! has enough sense to give these people credits to another DRM schemed service, so at the very least it is just a huge pain in the ass for these people to have to redownload all of their music from a new and equally locked scheme.

When I buy a song, it is mine! I paid for it, and I should be able to put it on every single one of my computers and digital media players, cds, cassettes, as a tatoo on my ass, etc. Good for Wal-Mart and their decision to sell music in the open and non-restrcted mp3 format. They should have some not insubstantial pull in this issue, and they have always been good at giving the customer what they want, which is why they are the single most successful business in America and the World.

And now you music industry idiots, particularly SoundExchange, are about to put my favorite online radio site Pandora.com out of business because you cannot come up with a fair rate to liscense "your" music to them with. It is unbelievablt that you would rather make a statement and ask for a shitload of money and end up with none, than to ask for a fair rate and make tons of money over time. Pandora has plenty of listeners, but you people are just too greedy and stupid to find a way to make money off of their creative business. You could charge a fair rate that would not put Pandora out of business and would thus allow you to make some liscensing fee money, while having the added benefit of getting music heard by an audience that is increasingly turning to online sources for everything (news, musics, videos, etc). NBC understands this, which is why they will be offering NFL games online for the first time ever this season (with ads on the page). They will be offering extras such as play-by-play action, instant replay control by the user, and multiple camera angles. This is genious on NBC's part and is another avenue for advertising revenue. But, again the recording industry doesn't understand this and seems content to just make their money from sueing people. I will let you idiots in on a little secret: Ever since I have been listening to my music on Pandora, I have not pirated music (well maybe just a little - but only about 1% of what I used to). I don't need to. I buy the stuff I really want, and Pandora offers enough variety in the stuff they stream, that things don't get old - my main impetus for downloading new music constantly. Similarly, ever since I started getting my movies on Netflix, I have not downloaded a single film. Why do I need to? I am already paying $15 a month to netflix, and if I downloaded and watched a movie on my PC, I would be wasting money I pay to Netflix because I could have watched the movie from them, and sent it back to receive another one to get the most out of my 15 bucks - plus, movies take up hard drive space that I could use for other things. A similar effect has happened with my downloading of TV shows and having them available on sites such as NBC.com. If I can watch them instantly via streaming on these sites, why waste the time it takes to download them. This has the added benefit for NBC that I am more likely to watch season 2 of Heros if I can catch up on season 1 first.

Some people and industries are smart enough to see the direction that things are going, and they find a way to use it to their advantage instead of fighting against it. It is still survival of the fittest, and the law may be making it easier for the less fit recording industry to survive and flounder a little bit longer than would otherwise be possible naturally (similar to the way the law allows people who cannot take care of themselves to live off of those of us who can), their idiotic behavior will eventually be their doom.