Music Giants Are Going For The Burn
from the slowly,-but-surely dept
It seems that the music industry is being pushed forward (kicking and screaming all the way, of course). MSNBC has an article detailing all the moves made this week to make label-backed downloading of music just a bit more user-friendly, including the ability to (occassionally, with a few restrictions) burn music to CD. Of course, the music industry has held back so long, and with such force, it seems like a big story when they open up just at tiny bit. There are still restrictions here that make such downloading not all that useful. What I find amusing, though, is that this move is in response to the realization that the music industry is struggling to compete against the music sharing services. If the music industry claims that being able to permanently keep or burn a song is going to kill the music industry, then why are they slowly (but surely) moving towards offering those services themselves? They’ll never admit to it, but they should have embraced these services from the beginning – when they could have kept some control. Instead, now they’re going to end up offering the same thing, but the process is just going to take much longer and be much more painful for them.