What Does the Future of the Music Industry Hold for Us?

What is happening to music? Will we be renting music from everyone instead of owning it? Will we be free to play it on anything we want or anywhere we want? I think that the future of music remains unclear. Many are challenging the idea of DRM for very legitamate reasons such as they can't play music on other music players becuase of the DRM. Many argue the rights of DRM to be reasonable, becuase they think music should be paid for and they're trying to put some control on it. I feel the pain of both sides. Understanding that anyone can try to justify their illegal and/or wrong behaviors such as stealing music. Anyone can say,"well I only need one stick of gum so I have a right to steal a piece out of this package. They are obviously wrong for stealing, but they can justify the'r actions until they're blue in the face and the silly ness continues. One side says it's okay to download illegally, "we have the right", and the other side says it's wrong, "music artists aren't getting their well deserved profit anymore". I don't feel we have the right to free music. We never have been able to get music free before unless on the radio, so why should we be able to download it for free? However, the problem lies deeper than just the downloading dilema. It is more of a need to answer the question, "what should a person be allowed to do with the music once they have paid for the download?", and "how much will it cost a person to download and how much will they charge for a person to do what ever they want with it, playing it anywhere on anything?". When we had tapes, they weren't handed out for free. You had to buy it, and if you felt you had the right to have it for free, you could steal it and risk getting caught for shoplifting. If you knew someone who had purchased the tape you could dub the whole tape on a blank tape and pass up the expensive costs of the original, or you could wait for the song to come on the radio and record it from their. Then the CD came, and the decision became, "do I buy the single tape with the one popular song I like?, or should I buy the new hip CD that I can play in the car cd player and the new stereos and at all my friends houses with their new cd players? Then burning CD's became intelligently affordable and popular, and everyone had all these anonymous discs with all kinds of illegally downloaded and burned music to share freely. Then, the popular and sheek ipod came. Now, you can take your music with you everywhere without scratching, skipping, tape eating, burning discs or stealing, and all the other ancient annoyances like dropping your walkman while rollerblading or carrying a boombox with you where ever you go to hang out. Either way you look at it, the game is all about the internet now. Figuring out how to control the consumers who download music and find a way to make money without having the music given away for free. Everything on the internet is free, so now the game is how can we create the coolest products to acces the best music. The only way to control the illegal downloading is to continue to have products for consumers to desire, and designing the products to only be capable to download from particluar stores and played on particluar music players. Even the cell phone music players are the best creations so far becuase everyone has a cell phone and now the game is who has one with music and how are they going to get their musc? It seems that the game of music retail and consumption is getting so difficult that the easiest way to have music is to download it illegally. The myth "it's simple, and not everyone gets caught", can be tricky to believe. I don't know about all that, but I think that it is possible for the government to get involved and regulate it and just come down hard on the internet. It's possible, but I didn't say I agreed that it'll be fare or not and people will definately not like it. Some people don't agree with the legal age of alcohol consumption either, but just because their is a legal age to drink doesn't stop people from drinking under the legal age limit. They risk getting caught, and some do get caught and pay the consequences. If they can't figure out how to control the online music industry their might not be a music industry. Still, between record labels' new ideas and computer companies' new ideas something has got to form a pattern for consumers to easily conform to a mutual, modern way of getting music while the music artist still gets a revenue. The future of music lies in the hands of the computer/internet industry now.