Rolling Stone’s article on the decline of the record industry doesn’t really throw up any surprises – shock! It was Napster’s fault! – but there are some telling comments at the end from RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol.

“A great American sector has been damaged enormously,” says the RIAA’s Bainwol, who blames piracy, “from songwriters to backup musicians to people who work at labels. The number of bands signed to labels has been compromised in a pretty severe fashion, roughly a third.”

It’s clear from the tone of these statements that the RIAA feel that by suing file-sharers they are in some way recompensing for the “damage” done to this “great American sector” (just American, Mitch?) – it is, in a way, a form of revenge from a company unwilling to face the fact that in 5 years time all recorded music will be given away for free, the act of a dying animal backed against a wall lashing out at anyone it feels has contributed to its demise, regardless of whether these targets are really at the core of the problem.

And of course they’re not. If I was one of the 20,000 people who’ve been sued by the RIAA since 2003 I’d feel very much like a scapegoat. You can point to Napster as the cause of the industry’s woes – but it didn’t have to be Napster, and had Napster not existed someone would have invented it, or a similar alternative. The situation we’re in now was inevitable.

Since the invention of the MP3, we’ve been headed irrevocably towards music being given away for free. As many people before me have commented, it’s like the shift from sheet music to phonograph records in the 1920s. The business of music is currently changing beyond recognition, and it’s not the kids sharing files who are to blame – they are, as teenagers are wont to do, merely reflecting the attitudes of their time, which is that music has no monetary value anymore, just an (all-important) emotional and functional value (in terms of the latter, think about the booming ringtone industry – kids will buy music if it serves a purpose and is linked to their precious mobile phones, so perhaps all is not lost for the industry moneymen…)

Field Music – She Can Do What She Wants

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