After years of trying to protect its content and sue anyone who illegally downloaded it, the industry has moved to forge partnerships with online retailers as sales slump.
In 2008, some 95 percent of the music downloaded from the Internet, or more than 40 billion files, was illegal, leaving the overall music market down around 7 percent on 2007.
Michael Robertson, the head of MP3Tunes who had to speak via video link because he is still engaged in copyright infringement lawsuits in the United States, urged the industry to go further and allow more experiments with their music.
“When you sue a new technology, you lose the opportunity to channel that into a positive direction,” he said.
“There is innovation happening but it’s coming from the dark side of the Internet, from pirates, from the underground. And that is showing where the industry is going to be.
“You have to look underground, to see what people are doing and then give them commercial outlets that mirror that.”
Consumers will only move to legal sites from illegal ones if the proposition is better and easier to use, critics say.
How often do you buy cd’s from a store these days? What the music industry needs to do is instead of suing people is go on big forums and working with the popular people on there, where do you think celebrity blogs or any site you can think of gets our images/videos/porn from? Forums run the internet dumbasses. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for CD’s to disappear like the Cassette tape did.
