.Evolving Music.

In a news item that probably shouldn’t surprise us all that much given the recent history of the recording industry and their increasingly desperate attempts to control something that is spiraling quickly out of control, it turns out that the settlements the RIAA has collected from lawsuits with Napster and other file sharing communities have never made it to the artists. Over $400 million dollars, supposedly collected because the artists were losing revenue off of pirated material, has been horded or squandered by the powers that be. While we talk frequently about the diminishing rights of the artists, the new models of distribution and the idea that the record industry is changing rapidly, let us not forget that huge amounts of control still reside with the dinosaurs of the music industry who will do anything to make a buck, even if it’s robbing the exact same artists they claim their legal actions help. Thanks to the consumerist for the update…

It should come as no surprise that people are still trying to get free music on the internet. Piracy and file swapping happens daily on massive levels that would probably turn a record executive green if they were fully aware of at least 50% of the volume. Luckily for the rest of the new and frontiersman-like recording industry, record executives are like mushrooms…they eat shit and grow in the dark, and in the end, you’re never sure which one is going to poison you or take you on a funky and psychedelic expedition. Similarly of good fortune for all of us…eating mushrooms isn’t mandatory or necessary anymore.

While the ultimate fate of DRM in general and player/company identified DRM specifically is still up in the air, there are a number of companies out there attempting to torpedo the industry by offering free mp3 downloads. Through deals with the major labels that tie-in to ad revenue generated by the site, these sites are offering songs, sometimes DRM protected, sometimes not. One of the big players that was geared to take the internet music download scene by storm this week was QTrax, a French based company that held a gala event this past weekend as a launch party. Apparently, they didn’t get the memo that the Warner group has not authorized the site to provide music from its label. Universal and EMI have also announced that they had no licensing deal ready yet and were still working on it. Not sure how a “free” music download site got to the point of throwing a launch party before it had wrapped up licensing and distribution sales with the major labels, but somehow they did. Guess it speaks to the necessity of having a solid business plan in place.

What I find more interesting is that not only is this site trying to provide music for free with the labels’ consent, but they’re allegedly trying to take a bite out of Apple, claiming that their music files will play on iPods. This would indeed be a big step as the only current music files that can play on the pod is either DRM-free or Apple FairPlay DRM tracks. How QTrax figures their DRM songs will make it onto the iPod is beyond me, but it will certainly be worth watching if and when the company starts allowing downloads.

Because everyone already has.

Plus, if you haven’t already heard about the band’s little social experiment, then you probably live in a cave. Or under a rock. Or under a rock IN a cave…Nothing against cavemen or flintstone types. You guys rock. (Pun totally intended.)

But, just in case you seriously don’t know what I’m talking about, click here or here. Or for NIN fans, here…They are almost as cool for being next in line.

Personally, I think this is the start of something big. And who better to lead the way than that obscure little quintet called Radiohead. The music industry is indeed evolving. This guy (who I stumbled across on Slashdot) seems to thinks so too. If your attention span is too short for his whole blog post, here are my favorite quotes:

“…they commenced suing Napster. We [Winamp] were naive to be sure, but we were genuinely surprised by the approach. Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn’t invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP. It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.”

“Convenience wins, hubris loses.”

I don’t think any of us know where this whole consumer-name-the-price and divorce-your-record-label thing will lead, but I dig their audacity and forward thinkingness.

Ah, crap. I just wrote about Radiohead.