More thoughts on MP3's

(unrefined ideas to follow)

The other day in class, my prof mentionned that the reason record companies are afraid of MP3's is because the market could quickly become something like in China - dominated by pirates who sell content for cheap (or in this case, give it away). Now this is fairly obvious, but it led me to question whether we really need to make money from music. While losing revenue is Bad For Artists, I think the only people it really hurts are huge record companies, and a minority of recording artists who actually make a significant profit fro their music (see the problem with music for details). So why don't we just make music a local thing, and have people who make a reasonable living playing it, as well as a lot of amateurs.

Of course, that would mean an end to the star system, and a bunch of other things. My idea is this: if MP3's help make recorded music less of a wierd, elitist, star-worship thing, and places more emphasis on live, local music, then I can't see the loss of billions in record sales revenue as a bad thing - record company execs will hardly starve.

Another bottom line: if no one can make a decent living as a musician, there won't be any commercial music. (Is that a bad thing?) Therefor, even if MP3's make all music inevitably freely available, other ways of paying musicians will emerge, or there will be significantly less music. That's my understanding of the market, anyway.

Either that, or musicians will find motives other than money to play music, which I think some of them already have.

If you haven't seen the cool web apps at halfbrain.com yet, they're definitely worth a look.

My roommate, Stefan, has the fastest loading manila site out there: Promises to have some interesting content, too - Stef does good poetry and a lot of non-sequiters.

Finite and Infinite Games. Another cool concept that applies to more than just what it describes (games). (via synthetic zero)

I think I like using bold for emphasis when I write longer bits.

It seems like 20 new blogs show up every day, many of which are suprisingly uninteresting. Heh. Welcome to the dark side. Anyway, thank god for filters.