asymco

The music industry has been missing something here. Instead of embracing the music renaissance brought about by the net and the .mp3 player, they've been fighting it. For example, their reaction to the success of iTunes is to fight it by supporting every lameass competitive platform, and thinking that revenue netural lower volumes at higher prices is a good thing (as in the $1.29 pricing: bad because you are changing habits and yet not even making more money.)

Dear music industry: these were your good old days.

The ipod you wanted to tax now does a lot more than play music. But instead of focusing your efforts on making sure that every one with an ipod has music playing at all times, you've been fighting it.

The music industry has been fighting rather than promoting primary demand for its product, as if listening to music had an inherent lock on user attention and it was all about figuring out how to charge/charge more for it.

Not only is this, obviously, not going to bring back the CD and its margins… but this renaissance has run its course as well. The #1 media player (the ipod touch) is now more game player than music player.

They're still doing it… getting in bed with google. google! The company whose business model works best when all content is free. And is any cloud/subscription model going to work when music is just one thing your device does?

I'm sure they'll all sit around and blame Apple.

But Steve Jobs provided the only working, revenue producing model for music in the internet age. They should have accepted that the CD was dead, and worked on supersizing 99 cent songs into $2.99 albums.