How to kill the music industry.

Music executives and RIAA lackeys the world over have blamed music piracy on the worldwide downturn of music sales that is killing their business. The pirates have generally responded by saying things like, “Dude, whatever.” But this eight-point response, published earlier this week on Torrentfreak, is quite possibly the most cogent argument I’ve heard from either side. It acknowledges the rise of gaming as taking a cut of our entertainment budgets, the thriving second-hand market triggered by new media and the ability to rip our CDs to MP3, and the growing irrelevance of the major label system that loses artists, big and small, to smaller, Internet-based distribution models, among other things. The main idea being, of course, that technology has already changed the world, while the music business operates on a post-dated check:

The fact is that the music industry’s revenues have been artificially inflated for decades because of limited consumer options. The last 15 years of innovation have lifted those limitations, effectively leaving the music industry with an obsolete, defective business model of monopolized production technology, forced album bundling, and almost nonexistent competition in the realm of home entertainment. What is happening now — the decline of music profits and the piracy witch hunt by the music industry — is merely the panicked struggle of a dying business model, a complacent industry’s refusal to accept its diminishing role in a digital world. The pirates are not the reason, and the decline is the not the disease. It is the cure.