Woman fined $2.4m for downloading 24 songs

A Minnesota woman has been fined $USD2.4m for being a music download “pirate”. ¬†The level of her activity was that she downloaded 24 songs illegaly. ¬†The link to the article is¬†here.

My initial reaction: WTF?

My considered reaction: most record companies are pretty much f*cking useless.  I know, I used to work for some of the biggest record companies in the world.  Some of them are good Рa few.  But most, instead of building fan bases, instead of nurturing communities, instead of building excitement in their products, their artists and their creativity, they crush their fans, they fight over ever decreasing and ever more irrelvant means to generate revenues.

Nearly SIX years ago, I wrote this piece “Dinosaurs of the recorded music industry must evolve or die” in which I made an impassioned plea for record companies to evolve their business models. ¬†I wrote the following things:

…digital networks are displacing traditional methods of production, distribution, and retail sales, allowing the customer direct access to music. Downloading enables direct market access for any artist, record label or potential supplier. It removes the barrier of expensive overheads contained in the traditional model. The biggest of these is, of course, the middleman: the record distribution company.

Not much has changed. ¬†Record companies still think people care about them – that there’ll be a captive market for every release – and their job isn’t to cultivate that market, but to stop them accessing music without paying for it. ¬†It’s so 1970s.