The music industry remains engaged in a battle against file sharers and organized piracy rings, with varied results due to government-led crackdowns and thousands of John Doe lawsuits against file sharers.
But with more than five billion songs sold through Apple iTunes alone, music listeners are showing they are ready to acquire digital music through legal channels. Napster has at least 700,000 subscribers, and other companies, like Amazon, also have had success selling music legally.
An interview with the President of the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), Rich Bengloff, discusses some of the problems facing the digital music industry and how these issues can be rectified.
"Piracy is a problem for all music creators, large or small... The goal for creators of music has to be to drive people to these legal sources of music and to make sure that these sources of music for consumers properly compensate artists and labels for the use of their music," Bengloff said in an interview with DailyTech. "Unless these entities and the social networking sites, as well as the sellers of music, physical and digital as well as mobile carriers and subscription oriented models properly compensate creators the creation process will decline."
Indeed, it seems like something must be done to try and find a neutral ground for both the music labels and the online radio stations and other online entities playing music. At the moment, sites like Pandora and other online radio stations are cranking along but may be forced out of business when royalty changes take place in 2010.
Even though A2IM obviously does not condone music piracy, the company does not openly endorse the RIAA's tactics of suing music listeners sharing files using peer-2-peer programs. The slippery slope in trying to deal with file sharers remains rather difficult to solve, and will continue to be a problem for years to come.
Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will continue the fight against the RIAA and MPAA, but digital music will continue to have a confusing aura as both sides continue to battle one another.
