More Money For The Big Guys, Less Music For Us

When Kazaa agreed this week to pay $115 million in damages to the recording industry and relaunch itself as a legal music download service, it perpetuated a business model that many observers see as shortsighted and seriously flawed. “Aside from the fact that there’s no clear mechanism for getting this money to the artists who are supposedly losing their livelihoods due to all of this downloading, what’s really shocking is how little it all adds up to in comparison with how much the record labels might have made by agreeing to Napster’s proposed plan, which would also have solved all of the device compatibility issues that still plague us today.”