Kid Rock (of all people) makes a funny statement about pirating music

He makes the correct point, but I think the industry has already corrected itself into a sales model for the digital age.

The whole reason why people were trading MP3’s in the first place was because the record companies gouged us on CD’s, and after paying all over again to replace our cassette/vinyl collections, we weren’t gonna get screwed on the digital conversion.

In the beginning, the record companies didn’t know how to do business online, and the technology for trading free files was readily available.  Everyone “in the know” took advantage of the situation to trade files to acquire what they’d had but not burned, plus some things they’d always wanted but didn’t buy.

Meanwhile, the online subscription model a la Musicmatch started to steal some of the thunder from pirating.  Tell people who have money that they can have access to 2 million songs on demand for $80 a year and they will bite, if they have a regular internet connection where they listen to music.  iTunes put the second nail in the coffin by making songs, especially new songs, available for a buck, which is a very fair price.  Finally, you add in services like Pandora and distribution channels like the iPhone, and the motivation to steal music becomes much more time consuming and undesirable than taking what’s legally available to you.

Make no mistake, there will always be some population of kids/poor but tech savvy people who will steal music.  There always has been.  But the widespread large scale trading of music is likely behind us for good, until the next big technological revolution comes around.