e.Digital Corporation (fka EDIG)

[culater33]

Light At The End Of The Music Tunnel?

Perhaps, though, the music industry is getting the idea. Larry Kenswil, president of Universal's eLabs division, looks at it this way:

"We could be 100 percent correct morally and legally that it is wrong to trade copyrighted files, but from a business standpoint it doesn't matter. We need to construct legal alternatives."

Which is what they now seem to be doing, perhaps spurred on by the current Justice Department probe into the music industry's alleged anti-competitive behavior.

According to the July 1 New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/01/technology/01
TUNE.html?ex=1026530709&ei=1&en=f36a2b6f2b1c164e), Universal Music Group now plans to license its catalog to Listen.com, where people can pay $10/month to play some (but not all) songs from the "big five" labels (http://news.com.com/2100-1023-940841.html?tag=dd.ne.dht.nl-sty.0). And there are indications that Warner will be expanding the number of artists' works that they will make available for online sale at $1.00 per song through MusicNet. (There is speculation, though, that listeners aren't willing to pay much more than 25-cents per song.) Unfortunately, the music industry's disparate online services still don't offer the P2P networks' "one stop shopping" for songs from all labels, which makes them less attractive...

Perhaps the music industry is now pragmatically reading the handwriting on the digital, peer-to-peer wall. Which would be a really good thing for them, since they still, for a while, have a choice, least the 31-million (U.S. only) file-sharing listeners decide that they're just not interested in listening to such "hostile tunes," at all.
http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20020715/20020715.htm#_Toc14328980
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