Craig Petzel

Being in a technology-booming environment, music along with other digital media is going through a revolution in terms of access for consumers. Only about 10 years ago, everyone’s main option for purchasing music was to buy it at music stores from the record labels. Now access to music has numerous ways to get to the consumer. Now it is being decided to have everything streamed, or have the actual digital information good on your hard disk or device.
I think that the record labels these days take the consumers for granted. Years ago when labels first started to sell music, buying the album at the local store was the most convenient way of listening to their music that they wanted to hear. Today, consumers have many different ways to get or hear the music that they want; if its doing the old fashioned way of buying the music from a store, or downloading the actual song from an online distributor (legal or not legal). Audio streaming is becoming extremely convenient in terms of access to number of songs at hand. With streaming, the user is confined to only listening purposes and does not have actual possession of a file. With these companies and labels deciding and coming up with ways to fix this problem, I think that the online revolution is going to keep going. For instance, if most consumers decide to switch to streaming and no longer use P2P, there will always be that underground group that will forge the song into an actual file. As long as there is music actually coming through the speakers, there will be a pirater recording, deciphering, converting, or doing whatever he has to do get the actual song on file. They will never actually stop the pirating of songs. There will always be someone coming up with ways to cheat the system, or make hardware that doesn’t care about copyrights.