Weed is the Way!

SML's Weed Digital Music Distribution System is the Answer to the Recording Industry's Woes

It's no secret that the music biz has been using file trading, i.e. "digital piracy," as a scapegoat for its own poor decisions and mismanagement for the better part of a decade. Thousands of lawsuits against music lovers and the passage of ill-conceived, more draconian copyright laws have done little to stop CD sales from circling the drain. Eric Garland of Big Champagne estimates that more than one billion digital tracks are still being illegally traded each month across peer-to-peer networks. "P2P remains an unacceptable problem," Mitch Bainwol, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) told Reuters earlier this month. "The folks engaged in the practice are doing more of it."

So what's the problem? Why hasn't the recording industry braintrust figured a way out of the Internet quagmire that has become its worst nightmare, a way to defeat the P2P boogeyman?

Lack of vision, that's the problem. The industry's self-appointed spokesman, Universal's Doug Morris, gets up on his hind legs every now and then and thumps his chest like the silver-backed simian he is, bleating about lawsuits and piracy and lost profits. But his verbal broadsides against MySpace and You Tube have done little to stop the flow of dollars out of the recording industry's pockets and into those of video game companies, movie studios and electronic gadget-makers. Nobody else in the industry has even Morris' foggy notions about fixing the so-called problem, or at least they haven't shared them publicly.

Top off the industry's impotence with its impending contract negotiation with Apple over iTunes. Many scribes, this one included, have written about the industry's demand that Apple adopt a "tiered" pricing program where, say, a hotter-than-hot, chart-topping Justin Timberlake tune might sell for $2.49 or even $2.99 while an older catalog cut would be a mere .69¢ download. Rather than be satisfied with the tens of millions of dollars of virtual "free money" that they're receiving from iTunes, Napster and Rhapsody, the RIAA and its patrons want the whole enchilada.