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© 2000 by Deborah Lagarde. Comments? E-mail-- "mailto:dlagarde@suite101.com"
It is virtually (no pun intended) a given now that with free shockwave, WAV file, real audio and MP3 downloads, free music is poosible and easily accessible. Even better is the fact that now you can see concerts live over the 'net--a far cry from the days when you thought you were in heaven if you got live fm radio simulcasts! See your favorite bands, that is, if you have the right software and hardware, and above all, a clear, uncongested, download and a lot of hard disk space! But how much does that cost? Assuming you have a PC (I have a Mac, so add about $100) the whole sha-bang shouldn't cost you more than $1000 (assuming you need to make upgrades, otherwise a couple of hundred). Imagine! For the cost about 15 rock concerts at about $60 each for good seats, which is what the top acts charge as well as the legends, folks in my time like the Rolling Stones, for instance, the darned thing pays for itself, and you can see concerts till you're blue in the face! Now of course not all of this is strictly free, but even whole albums' worth of music is so cheap it's almost free. I got this thing in snail mail a few weeks ago from CDNow ("http://www.cdnow.com/") about how you can go to their web site and for about $5 you can download a list of entire albums onto your hard disk, instead of ordering and paying shipping and what not! (Which reminds me of Print-on-Demand in the book industry, where you pay a wonderfully small fee and download entire books, no shipping costs!). And, of course, every music site on the Web has free MP3 downloads. All you need is cheap MP3 player software and presto! Okay, okay, so what is this doing to the music industry as we have known it since the sixties generation rock bands began revolutionizing it (and not all for the better for the consumer, I might add)? What will they admit to it doing? Mostly they complain about copyrights and bootlegging. But what you won't hear or read about unless you dig for it is that all this free stuff is great for consumers, which means it is not necessarily good for them, especially since free or almost free means less royalties, which is what music stars pretty much rely on for their massive incomes (okay, massive isn't exactly the right word, but you get my point). Go To Page: 1 2 |
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