Ordinary Gweilo

I remember when the main thing that worried the music industry was people naughtily making cassette tapes of some of their records and giving them to their friends.  They came up with the idiotic slogan ‘Home Taping is Killing Music’ and, do you know, I think they really believed that this was true.

Obviously technology has moved on somewhat, so now it’s CDs rather than records, and MP3s or CDs rather than cassette tapes, but the principle remains the same.

The real puzzle is why the record industry is still worried. Don’t they get it? People listen to music, people buy music, people go to concerts and buy merchandise. People who don’t listen to music don’t do any of these things, and don’t generate any revenue for the music industry. I know that when I was swapping music with my friends I was spending more money on buying LPs than I had been before.

Yet we have the clumsy attempts by record companies to limit what people can do with the music they buy. If I buy a CD, I want to be able to listen to it on my computer, download it on to my MP3 player and maybe even create a CD I could listen to in a car (if I had one). I don’t think any fair-minded person would deny that these are legitimate uses of the music I have purchased. The record industry would, of course, argue that I have paid for nothing more than the right to listen to the actual physical CD wherever I want, and not the music it contains. Hence I could purchase a portable CD player and listen to the CD on the move, but I am not entitled to download the contents of the CD to a much smaller MP3 player that I might realistically carry around.

Which led Sony to "enhance" some CDs so that they would install automatically software on to your PC that would control what you could do with the music. That was bad enough, but they made a horrible mess of doing this, and then couldn’t understand why people were complaining about it.  Other CDs have ridiculous restrictions up to and including being incompatible with Windows XP (see HK Macs) . 

OK, so rather than buying a CD, I’ll download the music I want. Easier said than done if you live in Hong Kong, unless I am missing something. I subscribed to Musicmatch Radio, and I can listen at home or at work, and it has an enabled me to discover quite a lot of music that I like. However, because I don’t live in the US I can’t download any of the tracks. Worse, they have now decided that I can’t even subscribe to Musicmatch Radio!

So here I am, willing to spend money to listen to music, but frustrated in my attempts to do so. Remind me again who it is that is killing music?