Is This the Beginning of the End for the RIAA?

[Tuckerfan]

UK service to offer free, legal downloads.

After a decade fighting to stop illegal file-sharing, the music industry will give fans today what they have always wanted: an unlimited supply of free and legal songs.

With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and with no limit on the number of tracks.

The service has been endorsed by the very same record companies - including EMI, Universal Music and Warner Music – that have chased file-sharers through the courts in a doomed attempt to prevent piracy. The gamble is that fans will put up with a limited amount of advertising around the Qtrax website’s jukebox in return for authorised use of almost every song available.

The tracks won’t be iPod compatible until April. Be interesting to see what they offer and if there’s any spyware involved.

[MsRobyn]

It’s about damn time.

Folk singer Janis Ian proposed a model where songs would be downloadable for a quarter a pop. There are lots of albums sitting in vaults that are not making money for anyone, so she reasoned that putting them up for download would be a license to print money, once the initial costs of digitization were met.

That said, I understand that musicians want to be paid for their work, and I’m all in favor of that. But the RIAA has made it so hard for music fans to feel any kind of sympathy that would make the fans want to buy the music. Heck, I’ve downloaded Metallica out of spite.

I wonder if the UK site will be available to US users. That’d be sweet.

Robin

[Barbarian]

Apparently this announcement is premature

[appleciders]

I think we’ll begin moving to a new equilibrium in the music industry where recorded music is seen as promotional for live concerts, and this sort of thing is more common. I wonder if that site will be available outside of the UK, and what sort of DRM will be attached?

[Beware_of_Doug]

I think they’d run into massive legal hassles if they tried this in the US. Our copyright code is Draconian compared to that of the UK. Even if the music industry backs it here, advocates of copyright “in perpetuity less 1 day” in other media (hellooo MPAA) will fight it like crazy.

Finally, there is a lot of back catalog the industry doesn’t want available, because it competes with heavily promoted properties. Say the McBeebee Twins Orchestra of 1928 only sells 200 downloads for every 10 million off the latest Skanky Titmouse CD. But imagine if there were 2,000 McBeebee Twins Orchestras available. Or 20,000.

Then imagine if all these McBeebee type artists become a phenomenon in themselves. Blogs and web pages and discussion groups spring up about this or that genre of “lost” music. A body of work once accessible only to stale nerds becomes cool. (Hey, it could happen…) Skanky Titmouse and her crowd would stand to lose a lot of the casual listeners that boost any big name’s numbers just 'cause she’s around and easy to find.