That Amazon Add-on
December 5th, 2008
David Kravets: “One person called the explanation for the project ‘absolute bullshit.; Another said, ‘Great, just make it apparent you are stealing stuff.’”
Well, first of all, it’s not stealing. It is a violation of copyright law to distribute an unauthorized copy.
That said, it is increasingly clear that the 1990s represented a narrow window of opportunity for the music industry. The cost of production, reproduction, artwork, and publicity fell as digital technology arrived for creative professionals. I recall that the first blank CD-R I bought cost $14. Once bandwidth caught up a little bit, the writing was on the wall.
It seems natural that the price for consumers should fall dramatically as they shoulder more of the distribution cost via BitTorrent. Amazon is providing a search service with an artificially inflated value because major US search engines don’t make it easy to search for mp3 files (contrast with Baidu). Why is it a surprise that this friction is being removed? Even iTunes is exploiting the same gap.
Just as the web has made marketing and distribution free for technology startups, the monetary value of marketing and distribution for creators with little computer programming acumen (e.g. most rock musicians) has plummeted. That is the principal service record companies provide aside from loans, so they are obsolete, as is their entire retail channel–digital or otherwise.