Wednesday, December 3, 2008

The Music Industry

The music industry really needs to get with the times. A case in point, from my own recent experience: I have recently gotten interested again in the music of AC/DC for the first time since college. Since I am fully in the digital music age, I roll on over to iTunes to buy some tunes. Lo and behold, AC/DC has exactly ZERO songs on iTunes...

Undaunted, I went to the AC/DC website. There you can buy every CD and a lot of LP releases that the band has ever had, but NO digital music. In desperation, I roll over to Dimple Records, my favorite local used CD shop, to see if I can score a "greatest hits" CD. It appears that AC/DC, whether out of some artistic premise or to simply keep selling the ol' catalogue, has NEVER released a greatest hits collection!

This is a story of a person that wants to get his favorite songs by a particular group in his selected format in a legal fashion. The only way for me to get my favorite AC/DC songs legally is to buy most of their albums in their entirety, rather than getting just the good stuff. Not that I would ever do so, but I think I now understand why black market music is so popular. Because I can't afford to buy a dozen or so CD's, there is no way for me to legally have AC/DC on my digital player of choice. Instead of $20 or so, the band will get nothing from me. How does that make sense?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey Mark I know your plight, try this place

http://www.gomusic.ru/

you can chose individual songs and you can play them first so you can get the right ones.

Rock ON !!


Zowie

Anonymous said...

Hi Mark! I can sympathize with you and I would extend your scope to include software as well. Oftentimes $300-$1,000 is way too much for me to spend on productivity software for my personal use. So rather than charging a whole bunch of us $50-$150 for a piece of software, they get nothing and have to deal with piracy. If they would lower the price they'd sell more units and the impact of piracy would go down.