Unsought Input

A lot of really crazy ideas were floated as the next big thing during the dot-com bubble. USB-powered olfactory devices, buying 50-pound bags of dogfood online, and even Internet currency backed by Whoopie Goldberg instead of the Fed all got a lot of press and a lot of money before disappearing.

You might remember a lot of excitement around the idea of Internet radio back then too. It seemed for a while that everyone and their brother was setting up RealServer on a spare Pentium II or signing up with Live 365 to broadcast the definitive European house techno mixes or every bootleg Phish MP3 they could collect to the masses. Streaming was dodgy, but possible, over dial-up speeds and it worked so well over high-speed lines that universities and offices ended up blocking ports.

But Internet radio has largely faded away. Was it a bad idea all along, like the CueCat? Nope. Was it killed by ever-expanding iPod storage? Probably not. Rather, Internet radio’s popularity and vitality were drained by a poorly-legislated artificial monopoly and compulsory licenses.

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For years, the representatives of the recording companies have issued predictions of doom and gloom for their own industry.  Since suing Napster in 1999 they have fretted over copyright infringement and piracy.  According to the RIAA, file sharing costs the industry $4.2 billion per year.
But now CD music sales are down 20% from 2006.  Has file sharing finally destroyed the music industry?  I doubt it.  Even if those lawsuits were having the chilling effect they are intended to spread, shutting down every P2P network on the planet, CD sales would be suffering.

Why? It’s tempting to say there’s no good new music, and that the record companies have brought this on themselves by promoting the Brtiney Spears’ of the world.  But I’m sure there’s good music out there somewhere, and this sounds more like a subjective criticism than a real hypothesis.

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