Don't Buy CDs This Christmas!

First published here.

"Mein Gott!" I said to myself in a bad German accent. I was reading the Wall Street Journal's latest piece on the music industry's imminent death-by-a-thousand-cuts. Just to be sure I wasn't barking up the wrong tree, I called up a stock broker friend to make sure my understanding of the free market wasn't as screwed up as the RIAA's seems to be.

"What happens to an existing monopoly when the market is opened up to it's competitors?" I asked

"Well, the first thing that happens is the share price of the company with the monopoly takes a hit. The market has to deal with a lot more new information about the industry sector, because there is more competition. Basically the whole thing is a mess for a while until everyone works out who the biggest player is going to be; whether the old monopoly can keep it's market share or if the new companies have taken such a big chunk of the action that the original leader has lost their dominance," was his answer.

"What is a market correction then?" I asked.

"In that situation? There would be a correction happening when the market takes the new players into account and the share price of the monopoly goes down. A correction is basically a reality check."

"How's the new iPod?"

"Oh, you're talking about the music industry! (Note: This kind of quick thinking is the reason he makes about thirty times the amount of money I do every year). Yeah, they're going to have some issues to work out over the next few years. Some of the smart ones will get through it, but a lot of the guys I work with think there'll be some big falls. I'm betting there'll be at least one big implosion. There's too much money and too much disruptive technology out there for someone not to go out with a bang".

Okay, so it wasn't just me thinking the music industry is coming out with the usual crap. At a first glance, their "nearly 20%" drop in sales looks legit. I wonder why that is? I sat down and had a think about it:

To start with, it seems my personal boycott is working! I do have to give some credit to the tens of thousands of other people who also refuse to buy music from major producers who back extremist legal wars on ordinary people, but for the moment I'd like to think a lot of it's down to me.

I also happened to glance at the all important Top 20 this week. Anyone else who saw it won't have any trouble figuring out why people aren't buying music. Interestingly, a comparison with the top ten highest grossing music tours this year shows that all the top touring acts are more than a decade old. Ah, the good old days!

That 40%-down-over-Thanksgiving thing was kind of weird. Wait a minute...when did the Sony rootkit fiasco start going down? Mark Russinovich broke the news on October 31st, right? And Thanksgiving was on the 24th of November this year, right? So the CD buying public in the US had a good three weeks to freak out about CD manufacturers putting easily hacked spyware on their precious PCs before the Thanksgiving holiday came along.

Just so we're all clear, the big record companies got caught trying to fuck over their customers, right before the biggest shopping season of the year. Smart move guys.

What I think the music industry needs now is a good old Commie shake up. It needs to be nationalized. For those too young to remember, this is what used to happen when an important industry was being managed by knuckleheads and started going down the toilet: the government would take over running it. You know all those public assets that the politicians keep selling off? They used to be "nationalized industries".

Now the music industry keeps telling us how important it is, so we should obviously take their word for it. Being vitally important, it seems the music industry needs some guidance through these troubling times. I mean, look what happens when you have a privatised energy market *cough* Enron *cough*.

It looks like the "creative industries" are faced with three choices:

1. Keep doing what they're doing now (my mate the stock broker knows some great bankruptcy lawyers if anyone should need them).

2. Hand the entire lot over for the governments to sort out (he also knows some exellent people who specialize in fraud and incompetence cases).

3. Be creative (Oh! The irony!) and work through it.

Whatever happens, I won't be buying any music this Christmas and I've specially asked my friends and family not to buy any for me either.

Instead, I'll be giving an amount equal to the price of a full CD to the Salvation Army.

There are people out there who really need my cash this Christmas, and they're certainly not billion dollar record companies.