If you are a music lover the Internet music industry has given you access to music like never before. No matter your taste in music, if it’s grooving to the latest hip hop tracks, or relaxing with classicial music, no problem. You can find what you like and download it within minutes.
By using special software you can now legally download just about every song that has ever been written. That’s a lot of music and should keep you happily busy for a good long while.
The Internet really has changed the music industry. At first the music industry powers that be misunderstood the Internet. They ignored it thinking that it was a geekish fad that would soon past. Let the nerds download a few songs from here and there. No matter. How many music loving nerds are out there anyway?
Apparently millions. After just a year or two, as the few nerdy downloads tuned into a flood, the music mogals decided they had better fight back. Thay actually brought lawsuits to bear upon poor average folks who enjoyed listening to music, especially free music they were collecting with peer to peer networks on the Internet. Good hard working folks like your uncle Bob and even Grandmother Beth were served with scary legal papers demanding that they cease all of that Internet music stuff and repent.
But folks love that Internet music. The more the music mogals sued and threw fits over revenue losses the more downloads took place. Millions and millions and zillions of them. Clearly the music bosses were on the wrong side of this issue.
Finally the lights begin to flicker on inside the captains of the music industry’s heads. Perhaps the lights would have come on sooner if they had been thinking clearly about how big a deal the Internet and computers were to become.
But one can’t be too hard on the good music executives. It’s hard for anyone to think too clearly during and after a three martini lunch. Let’s cut the guys some slack here. The gals too if any of them were big shot music execs at the time.
Probably there weren’t big shot lady music executives around as the gals would have realized much sooner that it would be much easier to make the thieving rascals who were stealing all of the good music stuff customers in a different Internet way rather than try to scare them into becoming deaf with frequent threats and letters from expensive lawyers.
But anyhow, the music industry folks finally did realize that the Internet was not going to be a fad after all and that never in the history of this world has there been a better way to distribute a product, especially a product that could be digitilized like music, and distributed worldwide over the Internet at so little cost.
Hey, there’s money to be made if the music goes through the proper Internet distibution channels. Their channels. Those shopping mall stores cost too much to operate anyway.
So what if it took the music industry guys until 2005 to fall into love with the Internet. Now they are in a firm loving embrace and are happy to have zillions of folks from all over the world paying them a little bit every time they download a song or two.
After all when you multiply any little old number times a zillion the total surely does add up fast.
There are still plently of folks who like to download free music but the paid sites are a lot more convienant to use and there is a lot less chance of sucking in some malware, syyware, or some really nasty computer virus during your download. The sound quality will be much better at most of the legal download sites as well, which is important to music lovers, so the pay for downloading model seems to be sound.
The future of music distribution, artists websites, movie distribution, software distribution, in fact anything that can be digitialized and downloaded to your compuer no matter where in the world you are located, looks to be bright.
People everywhere love their music and the Internet is just a dandy way to get it to them fast. And now we have Ipods. And MP3 devices, and more zillions of music loving people using them. The music industry mogals should easily be able to afford those fancy expensive lunches for a very long time.
And of course now they will tell you so. They knew that distributing music over the internet would be a big winner someday. In fact, to hear them tell it now they planned the whole thing.
Click (more) for download links. The ending/credits to Portal (part of Half-Life 2’s Orange Box) with the “Still Alive” song.
marco antonio muñiz