Replies

Actually there was a guy on TV just the other day discussing this very thing. I believe he was with Grokster. He had several ideas, which his company had approached the RIAA with, only to be shooed away.
I'm in a different line of work, and certainly don't claim to have all the answers. I would like to be able to, as an example, go into a music store and mix a professional quality CD from a master list. Or, sit at my computer and download a variety of tunes for a few cents each to burn my own CDs. etc etc
This was written in 2000:
The lesson for the RIAA here is that old distribution models can fail long before
anyone has any idea what the new models will look like. As with digital text, so now
with music. People have a strong preference for making unlimited perfect copies of the
music they want to hear. Napster now makes it feasible to do so in just the way the Web
made it possible with text. Right now, no one knows how musicians will be rewarded in
the future. But the lack of immediate alternatives doesn't change the fact that Napster
is the death knell for the current music distribution system. The music industry does
not need to know how musicians will be rewarded when this new system takes hold to know that musicians will be rewarded somehow. Society can't exist without artists; it can, however, exist without A&R departments.

I would like to be able to, as an example, go into a music store and mix a professional quality CD from a master list.

Nice! I'd go for that, if they weren't charging prohibitively.

BTW, how does recording off the radio fit into this?

Rather than going to the RIAA with it they should convince some musicians to sign onto it (and their company) and put the model to use.

I'm not convinced the distribution model is failing, these are just tough times for it. A lot of things are converging to make the RIAA's life very difficult right now, not the least of which is the fact that the music companies have lost their cajones and are no longer taking chances on marginal artists. Interesting that you picked a quote from 2000 that refered to everything changing in the text (book) industry, there was a lot of buzz about digital publishing back then, 3 years later it's all proven to be a bunch of hooey and the book industry is holding together very nicely and still slaughtering trees at an epic rate.