Sharing Music Socially
How timely. I’ve written a couple of times, including earlier this week, about what I believe is the biggest obstacle to convincing young adults not to download any music they can find whether it’s legal or not. And now today Eric Heels, on his copyright/baseball blog, tells us about a Norway based service that might just have figured out how to deal with this problem. There will certainly still be questions about the legality, but this comes closer to sitting around the dorm room listening to records than the downloading approach does. Rhapsody uses a similar model, where you listen to music for free - but Rhapsody pays the record companies. On the other hand, Rhapsody is a commercial venture, and they should pay for the music.
Personally, I think that the Ezmo model should be pursued. It will probably need tweaking, and I hate that there’s almost certainly bound to be lawsuits coming rather than civilized summit meetings, but Ezmo is on to something. The smart money is on them and other companies that are sharp enough, creative enough, and visionary enough to pursue this.
The internet has shown it’s ability to simultaneously shrink the world and expand the mind. I want humans to be clever enough to embrace the changes and adapt to them, not waste precious time and resources imitating Dana Carvey’s Grumpy Old Man. Especially in what is bound to be a losing battle - things can and should change, and since it’s inevitable that things will change whether we want them to or not, we ought to jump in and have a say about how the changes occur.
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