Charles on… anything that comes along

One thing I didn’t mention in the post below about the iTunes/indie tieup: the other strand of the story that I wrote looked at how much file-trading is still going on. The answer: enormous amounts which dwarf anything legal. 200 million, 300 million tracks; of course it’s hard to know how much is actually being traded, but even if it’s only 1 per cent, that’s a 10-million-tracks-plus-per-week network.

A few years ago I spoke to an audience of the indie labels. Was it 1999? 2000? Anyway, Napster (the original version) was all the rage. I held up the LaCie 20-gig book-sized portable drive that I’d put my music library onto and pointed out that things were changing - but that Napster (old-style) was their friend, because it would allow more people to come into contact with their music, and then potentially go to their gigs or buy their CDs and merchandise. They were too shocked at the idea of putting hundreds of CDs onto a hard drive to take in the rest.

And two years later I met a man from the US music licensing arm - which is completely apart from the RIAA - who said that they were aching to do a deal with Napster (v1), whereby they’d get paid a royalty each time an identifiable song was traded; Napster v1 could do that because it had a central server. but the record companies wouldn’t have it.

Which brings us to the present day, and the unpaid business far outweighs the paid-for. Nice one, record people.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• And while we're on the subject of music... is iTunes getting better, or worse? (6 April 2005; score: 37.62%)
• Chapters in podcasts: OK, that's smart (30 June 2005; score: 36.21%)
• Podcasting - now you too can hear voices in your sleep (28 June 2005; score: 32.8%)