Cases like this will force your internet service provider to read all your email, record all your internet browsing and make a copy of all your downloads. And the worst thing, it will be up to them to decide if what you do might be illegal and act on it.
Is the road owner responsible for the theft if you use the road while you steal a car?
They probably had to adopt SACD, come up with much higher quality music and SHOWCASE it, offer OTHER benefits while buying a CD/SACD, as I explained earlier. Something tangible. Half of the fun of Vinyl is the artwork, material it comes with… had to do something like that.
Secondly, get on with the technology, they should have started the streaming services, NOT Pandora, Spotify… they could have controlled the distribution, and SET THE PRICE, now it’s been set and standardized by Spotify. NO ONE would pay more than $10/mos, hence Tidal is not doing great on their HiFi version!
Movie industry responded A LOT better, they quickly supported Netflix, and didn’t PUSH the Blockbuster model as the music industry was doing. They’re now getting into the streaming business themselves.
Loudness wars, crappy music production, terrible compressed music that the industry pushed also didn’t help, as an mp3 version of Justin Bieber song sounds just as crappy as a FLAC 24-bit version! They got greedy, just wanted to push as many crappy produced and recorded music as possible on CDs, at a high cost and consumers and people including myself when in college were like wtf, this mp3 doesn’t sound half as bad and adopted it.
The rest is history!
I think your music points are apropos for audiophiles. But the unwashed masses really don’t care about SACD, or higher quality. I just don’t see how any of your ideas get around the technological issue of digital audio being super easy to copy and distribute, even streaming files.
The entire downfall began when an employee at a North Carolina CD pressing plant was able to smuggle prerelease CD’s out of the plant amidst high security. Originally he sold copies out of the trunk of his car. Along the way he met up with computer types who wanted to distribute the music across the internet, the original pirates - the game then was to get music out before it had been officially released. A handful of people planted the seeds that brought the record industry to its knees and there was nothing they could do about it.
Movies had the advantage of bandwidth issues that delayed the attack. They got to see what happened to music first and thus could position themselves a bit better.
But clearly disruption was destined.
I don’t have all the answers and I’m NOT talking about SACD being a solution today. No it can’t be. But just as Video moved from 480i to 480p to 720p/1080i then to 1080P and now 4K, music should have done something similar. Latest and greatest. They had to move 20yrs ago.
Look at it this way, 20-30yrs ago everyone had a stereo and played music and had a rack of CDs, but had access to only a few TV channels and watched 1-2 movies a week on DVD or VHS. Today, no one has a CD player, listens to little or no albums while everyone has multiple TVs and access to hundreds of channels and thousands of movies and shows. One industry innovated both technically, marketing wise, as well as distribution, another got stuck in doing the same old and didn’t move forward. Heck music industry can’t even have a digital standard for high res audio. Flac, Alac, MQA, 24-bit, DSD, PCM, mp3, aac, etc.
I always have to come back to Vinyl. YOU explain to me why the same ppl who don’t wanna pay for a CD, pay for Vinyl? It’s sound could also be copied and even persevered much better?! It sucks to keep clean, store, play, etc?! IMO, It’s BECAUSE, (a) it sounds good as it’s can’t be as compressed due to needle limitations, (b) it’s something tangible, great touch and feel, cool and interesting artwork and material, special wrapping. © nostalgia
Oh, and Vibyl revival has ZERO to do with music industry and all to do with music lovers and enthusiasts who went to great lengths to revive and even improve the good old analog technology. As always record companies were late to the game. 
Slightly off point for an audio forum, but it is not just the music industry. Video piracy is pretty significant too. According to one study:
• The impact of digital video piracy on revenues of the U.S. content production sector and related industries depends on the extent to which piracy is assumed to displace legal purchases. Based on a broad range of estimates, we find that digital video piracy conservatively causes lost domestic revenues of at least $29.2 billion and as much as $71.0 billion annually, representing a revenue reduction between 11% and 24%.
• Digital video piracy not only causes lost revenues to the U.S. content production sector, it also results in losses to the U.S. economy of between 230,000 and 560,000 jobs and between $47.5 billion and $115.3 billion in reduced gross domestic product (GDP) each year. While piracy remains a problem in the U.S., our analysis indicates that most of these losses (223,000 to 541,000 jobs and $45.7 billion to $111.1 billion in lost GDP) are due to digital video piracy of U.S. content by non-U.S. residents.
Made up figures, mind, by the industry that wants more legislation.
Stealing is wrong.
No sympathy for the companies that insist they are leasing us our digital albums, and use DRM to enforce it. None whatsoever.
They could have spent millions going streaming instead of billions lobbying government.
Maybe. No one is without blame. But I’ll give you the economists’ standard response: If they can’t protect their intellectual property, they won’t invest millions producing it. If you want to see the extreme case, look at newspapers, at least in the U.S. Yes, you can blame them for not figuring out how to go digital until it was too late, but ever since Craigslist killed their classified advertising revenue, and Google and Facebook walked away with the lion’s share of their other advertising revenue, most newspapers have been in a downward spiral. You could say it’s good for consumers, who can get a lot of news for “free.” But expensive news gathering such as investigative journalism and foreign news bureaus have been cut way down, and a lot of newspapers have gone out of business.
My last employment gig before retirement was in the art materials industry. This is a broader issue than music, believe me. Unlike say, a plumber, an artist’s time (be it a musician or visual artist) is too often given zero value by the consuming public.
And what I learned about painters is that they can’t NOT paint, being driven by their creativity. They’ll keep on creating in spite of … whatever. The plumber, on the other hand, won’t show up if he doesn’t get paid.
We’re surrounded by “free” visual creativity: street art, graffiti, advertising ,etc. as well as broadcast radio, internet radio, muzak. When music - even in a low-fi annoying form is as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, it implies a value.
It’s the rare artist that either gets “discovered” or figures out how to use the rational half of their brain to successfully monetize their talents.
Two very thoughtful and interesting posts.
Exactly! They’re literally pushing their head against the wall, expecting it to move!
Seems simple, doesn’t it?