UK Music Industry to consumers: Pay us for your music player!

It seems the music industry is getting greedier and greedier…even though many of us don’t think that possible, over the years they really have been consistent in surprising us. Seeing that their old business model is all but gone, the dinosaurs are slowly waking up and trying to change their old way of thinking. However positive that sounds, sadly they are still going about it in the wrong way and in the process just showing the ugly face of greed hiding behind their deeds.

In most people’s minds, fair (and legal) use of music means: you buy the CD/Music and play it in your choice of player/s… this usually means you rip it into the MP3 or other favorite digital format and copy it over to your music player or computer (a practice known as “format shifting” or “FS” for short), Unfortunately for a lot of people they would be wrong, because under current UK law ripping a CD you purchased (and FS) is still illegal.

What the music companies want you to do is: Buy a CD and then buy the same tracks again via a service like iTunes if you want to listen to them on your MP3 player… another idea that made them cream in their pants is if people would embrace the idea of buying the track repeatedly for each device (E.g CD player, MP3 player, Computer etc) or if you had to pay them for listening to a track more than X number of times (both of these idea’s have been tried via DRM of course) but end users just didn’t buy into the crap which left the industry searching for new ways to screw the end user.. and this time they think they might have found it….
The BPI (think RIAA scum for the UK), Music Producers Guild and the Music Publishers Assoc. have gotten together and said they would like to make FS legal only onto devices that are “licensed”, and by “licensed” they mean that the portable device makers (like Apple’s Ipod or Creative’s nano etc) should pay them a fee for the music that would eventually be played on that device stating that: “Unquestionably, there is a value produced by the ability to format shift for both consumers and commercial enterprises which directly arises from the transferability of music. Creator’s don’t see any of this value, and they should (because without them, there would be no value for anyone). It is imperative that creators and performers should benefit directly from this value, as ultimately it is their creativity which underpins the entire value chain.”

In their statement of “Creator’s don’t see any of this value” they seem to have conveniently forgotten that the consumer has already paid for the CD that she has ripped onto her MP3 player.

Knowing that going after each consumer for ripping their music onto their favorite player is an impossible task, the industry has basically shifted tactics and wants to tax everyone by adding a fee to players before the consumer can actually put music (legal or otherwise) onto it, much like the way the industry collects millions of dollars from blank media (like blank CDs,DVDs etc) sales in Canada because “some of the media will be used in the recording of pirated music” (This “piracy money” has never actually reached any of the artists so far of course… but that’s a discussion for another article). Forcing device makers to pay them a fee just because music will be played on these devices is as silly as Hollywood asking TV manufacturers to pay them a fee because images from a movie they released will be shown on the TV or digital camera makers asking Microsoft to pay them a fee because end users will eventually see pictures on their monitors.

This does go further than basic half minded stupidity of course; If this was passed into law not only would this fatten the already fat corporate goons of the music industry but would have them in a position of controlling innovation to a certain extent by refusing to “license” new products unless a certain amount was paid to them.

Microsoft does get a good sized chunk of blame for this too of course, if it was not for its dangerous precedent of paying Universal a buck for every Zune player it sold its unlikely this would be taken as seriously today. (The above is another titbit for you to add to your arsenal of reasons to dislike Micro$oft… on top of Vista’s UAC of course)

Looking into the past it would also be an open invitation for never ending fee increments for licensing that would be added to the players to make up for inflation, “rising piracy” and losses incurred due to their inflated numbers of music piracy.

Gotto love those sneaky little b@stards, don’t you?

Tags: BPI, greed, MP3, Music, RIAA, UK