About a week ago, I played a new version of my all time favourite game, FIFA 2002. Fans of the game know that the music that accompanies the game simply rocks. So when I heard the chant’it’s the music that we choose’, I knew I had to get that single.
I could’ve gone to the biggest music store in my city, explain what I heard, the people across the counter would have looked dumbfounded and told me to get the artist and name of the song. Then if I was lucky I might get the cassette, otherwise I could pay 600 bucks for a cd or load FIFA every time I wanted to hear the song.
Or I could look for the name of the song on a search engine, load up Napster and have the song looped indefinitely in Winamp in 30 minutes.
For the first time, internet users all over the world had a chance to surpass restrictive and primitive boundaries set by so called’safe-guards of music artists and their work’. Simple technology brought us the music that we actually wanted to hear, anytime. That’s something that music industry should have catered to ages back.
So the idea of banning Napster was the first thing that came to RIAA’s mind;it was like stopping Godzilla run over all your riches. It’s been two years since Napster was hot discussion in PCQuest, and even today music conglomerates are struggling with fee-based services and ways to deliver customizable ways of listening to music.
Make no mistake; the industry is extremely concerned for artists. And we wait impatiently for it to bring us ways to experience digital content in a friendly and customizable way. Until then, I really dig Audiogalaxy’s ‘groups’. Who would’ve imagined being involved in a trans-national discussion on Bombay-pop music while listening to your favourite artist’s unreleased single?!