Madonna released her new album yesterday (Tuesday), though it was available for several weeks on the Infosuperweb, if you looked hard enough. Perhaps you’re one of the people that went hunting, only to have an MP3 of Madonna saying, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing,” which I thought was pretty funny. But what the fuck did she think she was doing is my question. So she made it a little more difficult for people to download her album, but let’s be honest, anyone who wanted the album got their hands on it. It was all over the place. Hell, I even downloaded some of it just to get the phoney decoy tracks and came up with the real thing.
I don’t know how many times I have to explain this, but the labels cannot win. The kids are smarter than you, they’re ten steps ahead of you and if you fuck with them, they will get you back. During these tumultuous times that the music industry is going through, it would behoove you to spend your time thinking up ways to embrace the technology, rather than fight against it. Make it real pretty and real easy for people to purchase (yes, you read that correctly) what they want, when they want it and see what happens. You may just find a business model in there somewhere. I won’t even charge you for the idea.
In somewhat related news: A couple of the major labels are getting creative with their lawyers.
