Selling Plastic Coasters

I was going to ramble about how the Washington Post is making an awful lot of noise about a nickel, until I realized the Wal-Mart tracks are DRM-free, which makes them comparable to the $1.29 EMI tracks on iTunes.

Wal-Mart. DRM-free. We're witnessing something important here, I think, but that's not what I want to get into.

The same article somewhat breathlessly reports that "In April, beset by piracy and online song sales, the Recording Industry Association of America reported that revenue from CD sales slumped 13 percent in 2006, its steepest yearly drop by far." For some context, Coolfer has the goods, in that year-over-year digital sales are up 45%.

None of these percentages get into real dollars, so the digital increase might not shore up the actual dollars lost. But the fixation on actual CD sales underscores one of my biggest issues with the whole of the record industry, and the treatment of the record industry. By very definition, the record industry is in the business of making records, which is wholly different from making music. By focusing so heavily on the sale of physical CDs, you get away from the bigger picture, which is the sale of actual music, which is now a much larger issue than just those pieces of plastic. The sooner everyone realizes that -- and to be fair, more and more people do seem to be realizing that -- the sooner we can actually let this paradigm shift instead of being dragged kicking and screaming into the future.