How RIAA's Shooting Itself in the Foot without Really Trying…

Every day on the news, we read about the music industry, in the form of RIAA, trapping and jailing another kid or another grandparent. While I don’t condone copyright violations, I have felt from the beginning that this battle against online piracy was a deflection, the creating of scapegoats for the music industry’s problems. Now, as sales statistics are rolling in while the online piracy war is raging, the opposite seems to be true. CD sales are not increasing but continuing to decline and at a faster rate than before.

Now, as this is going on and customers are getting an even worse taste in their mouth about the music industries, they are releasing copy protected CD’s that won’t play or will allow only limited play on PC’s. Well, for all you music industry executives out there who aren’t listening, let me say that if I can’t play CD’s on my PC, uh, Mac anymore, I have no real use for buying any CD. Most of my music machines are Mac’s. I seldom listen to CD’s in my car, and my household is usually too busy to shut down the TV’s or Mac's or PC’s in the rest of the house to listen to our only regular CD player in the living room.

Have I bought any music CD’s lately? You bet! This past weekend I had the wonderful privilege of seeing and listening live to one of my favorite groups, Brulé, as they played at the Indian Summer Festival in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My wife and I bought 3 of their CD’s and did so almost without thinking because I KNEW they weren’t copy protected and I could play them wherever I wanted. If the CD's had been copy protected, would I have bought them? No. I’m not going to spend money on a product I can’t use in the manner I want to and that is within the law.

I will shy away from any mainstream music CD’s that incorporate copy protection. The debacle of a CD screwing up one of my computers or an arbitrary restriction on where I can listen to my music is not something I’m going to endure. I'm not going to spend any time trtying to figure out which ones I can play and which I can't. I suspect a lot of people will feel that way; and, in the end, RIAA and the music industry will discover they were trying to control the uncontrollable and that more time spent innovating and producing better product would have benefited them a hell of a lot more.