In the past, there were many ways to discover music, and the best of these ways was radio. It played a wide variety of music, and took requests. Best of all, radio was free to the listener. Now, radio stations have a very limited playlist, and don't take requests. When they occasionally stop talking and running ads long enough to play some songs, we hear the same plastic commercialized ones over and over. The radio we knew is gone. Another way we discovered music was at the record store. Retailers had listening booths where we could try before buying, free of charge. With few exceptions, Those are gone now, too. A few retailers let us listen to a small sample of songs on a disc, five to seven seconds in length, but that is no substitute.
For most of the 1990s, it seemed that music had died. Then came Napster. It was again possible to try a wide variety of music, and once fans discovered what they really liked, many of us did buy. CD sales were up while Napster was online. It was a promotion better than radio or MTV had ever been! Sure, some people never bought anything, but that is the cost of promotion, and no one had to cough up any payola to get listed on Napster. They say all good things come to an end, and Napster did. Not only had the industry looked a gift horse in the mouth, they had it put down. Millions of us around the world were sad, and many were angry. We turned to other file trading sites, but none have ever worked as well.
Price is also an important issue. When CDs were a new medium, they cost twice as much as LP or Cassette. We were promised that as this new medium's cost to produce came down, so would the retail price. This was a lie! The prices never came down, and are higher than ever! In markets where LP and Cassette are still sold, their retail price is lower than CD, even though the cost to produce them is more. A cassette has multiple components that have to be assembled. An LP must be shipped with even greater care to avoid damage, and takes up more valuable shelf space. The prices make no sense!
The last straw was when the record companies made "copy protected" CDs. The labels thought that by making them unplayable in a computer, they could prevent anyone from ripping tracks, and offering them on file trading networks, or copying whole discs to CD-R. Guess what? They can be copied, just with greater difficulty. They can be ripped, and offered on file trading networks, just with greater difficulty, They are useless, however, to millions of legitimate purchasers of CDs. For many of us, the CD-Rom drive in our computer is our only player. For others, the CD-Rom drive in our laptop is our preferred method while commuting to work or traveling. Frequently, these disks don't work in a car CD player, or in brand new dedicated CD players. This was the final insult. This meant war! This website began as a response to it, and will be here until the recording industry reforms itself, or perishes. If the recording industry as it exists today does perish, we all want to a see a new music industry of, by, and for music lovers rise from its ashes. Music existed for millennia before the invention of the phonograph, and does not need the recording industry to survive. Once again, Artists should not assume that the millions around the world are angry at them, and should not believe the RIAA's outrageous assertions that their fans intend to steal from them. We are mad at the industry.
Matthew Brown
Webmaster of dontbuycds.org