Hundreds of thousands of users belie your personal fantasy.
The RIAA was not in any way living on the same Peter Pan cloud where you personally live, and that is why they squandered millions and got themselves in Dutch with the courts trying to shut MP3.com down. They were corrupt but not stupid. They knew there was no way in hell they could afford to pay for the rights to the music of every talented act out there...and they were right.
Their inability to shut down independent music through judicial fiat directly lead to the current state of affairs. Young people now listen to a vast tableau of acts and decent writers and musicians now retain the distribution rights to their music.
Delusional? No. It is not myself, MP3.com’s vast customer base 20 years ago, and the RIAA who are delusional about what customers wanted. That played out and it shattered the power the record companies had.
If there were any merit of any sort in your pathetic little I’ll thought out screed the record companies would still be dictating terms.
But they aren’t, now are they?
Next time, (before you post on this topic) have someone competent go over what you wish to say and correct it for you.
Oh, you are trying desperately to be dismissive of someone who is intimately familiar with the history of these events so you can look oh, so erudite with your twaddle. It doesn't work. "Peter Pan cloud. . . funny. The indies back then were not driving much of anything. That's a pipe dream. People back then wanted the big names. . . not some unknown guy recording his music in a garage with cheap equipment. . . on poor quality production standards.
You are TRULY delusional. Markets change over years. . . and the music market changed over years as well. You introduce a big player into a closed market and things change fast. The big publishers of music learned they had to change as well and found that Apple had a LOT of clout.
DID YOU READ STEVE JOBS' OPEN LETTER TO THE PUBLISHERS ABOUT REMOVING DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT????
That is history. . . the CEO of the biggest music store in the world challenged them to change what they were doing.
The fact is that the music Record companies no longer had the power they once had. . . That power had moved from them to Apple and Amazon. And Apple and Amazon did not want Digital Rights Management, which is what the Record Companies DEMANDED as the key to open their catalogs.
Steve's letter pissed them off. . . so they let Amazon have DRM free music first. . . but the breech in the dike was made. . . and the waters of DRM free music was tearing a big hole in their dam. Several months later DRM free music made its appearance on iTunes and the DAMN DRM DAM burst.
As for your claim of MP3.com's "vast" customer base, there was no such thing. It was a piddly little group of people who bought and a larger group of pirates who STOLE their music and traded stolen music on Napster, an illegal way to trade music in which the artists were not compensated for their works, or their rightful copyrights. Were there "thousands"? YUP? There were. Were there "millions"? Probably not. Even "hundreds of thousands of users" is a drop in a proverbial bucket. That is a market of aficionados at best. It is not large enough to drive much of any market forces. Your idiotic straw man about whether the control of the market being still in the hands of the big record companies or not is just that: idiotic. It shows you have no knowledge of economics, market forces, or how they play out. Nor do you have a grasp of history. You see your little area of interest as though it were the be-all-and-end-all, delusion-ally controlling a market so far beyond it in size the tale wagging the dog is gigantic beside it. . . it's more as if a flea were to have scratched the dog off of it's ear!
If any company empowered the Independent musicians and music producers, and independent music producers it has been Apple. Apple opened up iTunes to the Indies, Apple created the tools for independent musicians to create music with Garageband, LogicPro, and any others.
Next time you post something on an Apple thread, have someone who knows what they are talking about go over it and post something intelligent.