Trent Reznor and the music business revolution

I find the first few minutes of the following video pretty interesting. For a time now, Trent Reznor[wiki] has been calling for fans to steal his music, and here is proof that he’s taking his message to the people and not just the media.

Basically, he’s upset, just as much as you and I are, that prices for buying music, mainly CD albums, has become ridiculously expensive. The cost for buying the latest release by your favorite band is usually in the $15-$25 range, sometimes more. As prices go up, people resort to stealing, making record companies lose money because no one is buying the product from the shelves, and to compensate they drive the CD price higher to fill in the lacking profit margins. Vicious circle? You bet.

Digital downloads are a whole other story, but even the record companies would like to see a better price than $.99 a track on iTunes. In fact, that isn’t the case for all tracks anymore because you can get music at a better bit rate and quality at just over a dollar or so, but the industry doesn’t budge like that for nothing. If they had their way, you’d be paying more than that and tell you the reason being is copyright compensation to the artist.

Every time I think about this topic, I’m constantly reminded by what Steve Albini wrote in his “The Problem With Music“. It was written just ahead of the digital music revolution in the 90’s, but I hesitate to think that the industry has moved past that mode of operation. It’s worth a read if you’ve never seen it before.

I have to say that I’m with Trent Reznor on this. The industry needs to learn a whole new way of thinking. Not sure that I’d run out a grab a ton of CD’s if they were $5-10 a piece, but it would certainly make me consider the notion. If anything, you might just save the youth of the world from missing out on some great artists because a thirteen year old could buy three for the price of today’s one.