Tech: Comical lesson has yet to be learned from the RIAA’s battles: “With the cost of CDs rising to $19 a disc, users now prefer to sample before they buy, and the best way to take a customer who traditionally only buys rock and pop and sell them boatloads of hip-hop, soul and jazz is to give them the opportunity to find the connections on their own. The recording industry would also have learned that its customers are young and unafraid of technology, and they appreciate that interacting with your music as a folder on your hard drive has advantages over interacting with them in a 300-CD rack in the corner of the living room. The RIAA would also have learned that a huge segment of its most lucrative customer base has a high-speed Internet connection, which would imply a whole new method of delivering content. But no, they couldn’t see any of that. They chose to see digital music solely as an enemy and solely as a vector of piracy, and they fought it on that basis.”
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