Old Fashioned Record Labels are a Relic of the Past-They just do not know it yet

The RIAA is serially bullying people with lawsuits. This effort is aimed at discouraging people from downloading music.  The fact is their business model was made obsolete at the time of the adoption of MP3 music compression. 

Let’s use some common sense thinking on this situation:

1- The music the record labels were selling never was worth much.  Sure they got some dumb kids to pay for it.  The reality is the marginal cost of production of their vaporware product is nil. 

2- The labels had such a revenue stream for so long that they can not believe the party is at an end.

3- RadioHead has gone direct to the public over the internet.

Its been obvious for some time that the labels are in a mortal death spiral that will end their existence.  What the hell did they ever do anyway?  Distribution.  No need for that in the age of the internet.  We’re all smart enough to decide what kind of music we like and with the internet we don’t need them any more.

I delight in seeing them dwindle.  As people they have never impressed me. They have done a good job of faking everyone out to make them believe that the labels are still relevant.  Their business model is broken. No amount of lawsuits will fix that.

In the mean time if you download songs you need to be a little tricky so they can’t ping you.  Somehow this group of trolles managed to get a jury to award them 220,000 dollars from a single mother.  Sounds suspicious to me. You’d have to bribe me in the near 6 figures to rule in favor of them. Thus I wonder if the jury was lubed and greased. They could not afford to lose this case.  Had they lost it would have shut down their campaign of intimidation.