Fire Alarms Systems

Welcome to the second half of our rather longwinded look at the attempted industriacide committed by various music formats over the years. Part two concerns itself with the Digital Era, an era that started with the introduction of the CD, which was hailed by the industry as the "savior of the music business," right up until someone had the bright idea of "releasing" CDs with nothing on them. Read on... 

Compact Discs
If LPs and cassettes were the show ponies of the media race, the "CD" (or "See Dee") was Manowar, Secretariat and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse's horses rolled into one.

Popular, cheap to produce and yet another format to completists with Beitel had all the CD. Distribution cost? $ 0. Paid from the artist's royalties. The production cost? Studio time? Blow? Free. All paid for the artist. Plastic, paper, ink - all cheap. Many, many, many benefits.

The music industry reacted to their incredible good fortune, as anyone would be shortsighted Leviathan: by steadily increasing prices. Soon, customers paid $ 19 for a good song and 11 shitty ones. In addition, the new format was 20-25 minutes longer than the LP tackle what many bands wrote their albums with filler and her drummer. Finally, after so many other formats and over again, "killing the music industry," they had found a savior in a nice, cheap plastic disc.

But there were problems on the horizon. The two ghosts "used CDs" and "CD-Rs" soon bought a shadow on the hookers and blow his ill-gotten gains.

The first, "used CDs," has been decried by artists as disparate as Garth Brooks and incredibly rich (68 million albums sold) and Chris Gaines (traded 1.1 million albums in CD shops use). They now demanded to be paid back every time the music changed hands, claiming that buying music in this format you to a vague and ever-changing contract exposed, filled with more than a drinking game rule changes.

The other, "CD-R," when combined with affordable CD burners, a slightly battered industry pushed to the brink of a long staircase. The industry responded with more built-in fees and cries of "home burning kills music." This cry of fire departments and various local indie-leaning interpreted arsonists who had developed rapidly in both counter-productive action wrong.

MiniDisc
Having learned nothing from his "Betamax" experiment, forged from Sony with a boldly miscalculated attempt to market a non-existent with the MiniDisc corner. Like a CD, only smaller, lighter, lost / damaged and handcuffed to Sony hardware, the MiniDisc never had a chance.

Sony was once again empty handed from the R & D roulette table, with only indicates that early adopters will buy anything as long as it is shiny and expensive. Its ability to store music on the small size disc record threatened to destroy the music industry, or at least kick it a little if it was safely shut down. The music industry reacted to these pint-sized villain with "Awwww. The little guy tries to say something" and struck it with some punitive charges.

mp3
Not content with merely a threat to the entire music industry has the mp3 of the memory-friendly compression ratio and ultra-portability, which had no other medium, and actually destroyed the music industry. The music industry was really "fuckt", as Mozart had so aptly put it in front of millions of years. His Rasputin-like longevity was his Rasputin-like threat as inclination to evil behavior. Now everyone can have Tom, Dick and Harry could download an eMachines and dump hundreds of pirated songs on jump drives, MP3 players and CDs, with absolutely no physical exertion. And thanks to the major labels and their years of price gouging, no one had bothered to look in the least, she limped into port in pirate wounds covered.

Soon the good ship "outdated industry" was leaking money from a million tiny holes. So-called "experts", under the guise of lawyers and yes-men, were consulted. Everyone agreed on two things:

1st Something should be done too vague in the future.
2nd Someone should be sued.

It called Dark Elf Lars Ulrich to the face of the international music piracy attack: a certain Shawn Fanning. Coming off their most successful album to date, Metallica forged in front of (self-) righteous anger, alienation of a whole generation of potential fans. With Napster on the ropes, the music industry went from barn to barn, to ensure that all horses were in fact missing and methodically began slamming door to door.

A nation of tweens and octogenarians were summoned to court and threatened with fines exorbitant rates for download / upload of "Happy Birthday" and other top-40 songs. Kazaa saw with horror that swept its users (the numbers in the dozens) in court proceedings after the action. In the meantime, malware creators watched in horror as their other victims lost their Internet rights, and a lot of money, both very important components of their sustained success.

Other high-dollar actors got into the act. Madonna seeded with mp3s of file sharers to ask her: "What the hell do you think you're doing?" Most pirates found this immensely preferable, their second-class British accent and occasional electronica. Alicia Silverstone hurried her irrelevance, having appeared in magazine ads remind people that stealing was stealing mp3s just like cars, a step that the "cool" factor of file sharing on the journey into the unknown upped. The youth of the world, properly chastened, moved on to P2P torrents essentially change from joyriding to Gone in 60 Seconds .

As the industry bled, he called his archangels, Bono, in the seemingly "paper record", which says flatly that America follow the lead of Communist China and pursuing any information required travel on the Internet. This was mocking derision and shouting "Fuck you, Bono met! Finance Find another way to your broken electric lemon!"

In a panic, lawsuits filled countless courtrooms and fed countless corporate lawyers' pockets. Bills for the "lost revenue" was for everyone, that "music" existed presents recognized. Each and everyone was asked to "give until it hurts" to support in order to sag multi-billion dollar industry. No one was spared. YouTube, Blogger, Girl Scouts, Mom & Pop stores, animal shelters, cop shops, hotels, bars and nightclubs have all been notches on rent-seeking industry bedpost.

Nothing stopped the bleeding. Mp3 the mighty, victorious over King Music (k), variable bit rate triumphantly waved his, zipped into a compressed file and hid among the crowded shelves of Mediafire, RapidShare and Megaupload.

The "cloud"
The industry wasn 't be done yet, killed, despite the efforts of a new compression format. To change the latest and greatest thing in the music scene was something to euphemistically as "the cloud." Now this "cloud" wasn 't so much "little" and "fluffy' as Rickie Lee Jones sues the clouds for so many years ago, but rather a unpicturesque rack of redundant servers. With Amazon, and Google is taking the lead shortly thereafter, music fans now have a new, ultra-portable way to enjoy their music.

The labels and various rights groups because they were not too new "cloud" rolled out satisfied. The performance rights groups noted that there is really only interested in a kind of "Streaming": the money in their pockets. The major labels declared this a violation of its unwritten end user license agreement, which didn 't allow for music that can be accessed anywhere at any time. "Music wasn 't meant to be portable," it bitched. "After all, it has never been before," said it like it like looking back to the heady days of cassettes, CDs, 8-tracks and mini discs.

Although there have been no complaints yet, it can only be a matter of time before the shambling, cadaverous music industry is trying, Amazon, Google, et al in the Stone Age to sue, musically speaking. His only hope now is to return to the days before music could be about how so many photos on an SD card, a golden era in hearing meant by music purchase an ultra-expensive, hand-operated phonograph, whose incredible weight requires a team performed are the child workers to install.

To become like Big Music limps into the future, cursing all the way, wavering clutching his Congressional life support system, music lovers can be sure of one thing: behind every technological step forward, there 's an angry record exec dies (not literally Of course to take) every two steps back.

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