For the past decade, the battle between consumers and the RIAA raged. Consumers wanted the right to use music they purchased however or on whatever they desired. The RIAA rejected this notion, and sued customers that digitally traded copies of albums. The RIAA shunned its consumers, and polluted their product with digital rights management (DRM), preventing customers from using their music how they wanted. While this battle raged, most bands sat quietly on the sidelines or cheered on the RIAA (see Metallica).
Those days may be over.
Last week mega-group Radiohead announced their new album “In Rainbows” would only be available online, and consumers would choose what they would pay for it. Want the album for free? It’s yours!
Today, after a recent tirade against record companies, Nine Inch Nails dumped their record label. A post on their website states:
I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate.
Tech site Gizmodo has a great writeup about the changing face of labels:
If two of the biggest acts in the industry can see the digital writing on the wall and totally embrace it—that the old way of doing business is broken—why can’t the labels? What Radiohead and NIN are showing is that the business model “of the future” feared by entrenched interests isn’t arriving some time in the horizon. It’s touching down now.
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