The free market is a tough thing to manipulate. Just ask the Recording Industry Association of America, which has gone to great lengths to avoid changing its business model and profit margins, but has failed miserably.

The industry's latest strategy is to attack college students who have music files on their hard drives. Princeton is involved right now in a tiff with the RIAA and may end up in court over it.

Here's the thing: Anyone with a computer and a modem has access to just about any song, any time, for free. The RIAA can level lawsuit after lawsuit at college students and peer-to-peer file sharing groups, but the technology remains and it won't go away. Adjust or die.

New readily-available technology will force record companies to streamline their operations and think of innovative new ways to make money, and some may fall along the wayside because they can't adjust to the new market.

Yet so far, the methods they've chosen have been seriously misguided.

In a free market economy, people don't pay money for what they can get for free. If people can get music for free from source A, or they can get it for $16.50 per compact disk from source B, source B is going to have problems unless it can offer consumers an additional incentive.

And what incentives has the RIAA given the consumer? None. In fact, in many cases the RIAA has alienated its consumers by vilifying them and whining about pirating.

For the price of 10 CDs, a consumer can get a reasonably priced CD-burner. For the cost of an additional three CDs a month, throw in a high-speed Internet connection.

Record companies can compete with these prices if they want to. The cost of producing a CD isn't really that high, so it is very possible to lower album prices significantly and still be in the black.

The second response from the recording industry was to come up with subscriber music downloading programs, but the software pales in comparison to free programs.

They can't compete with free ones because of the restrictions placed on the music you pay for. In some cases you can't burn the music to a CD, can't access it without being online, or can't get it from your hard drive onto an MP3 player. These are all features consumers get FOR FREE with file-swapping programs.

This is not a cry against musicians who want fair payment, and I'm not saying copyrights don't matter. I'm not saying we are entitled to free music that musicians work hard to make.

What I am saying is that the technology exists. It won't go away, but record companies might if they don't implement some serious overhauls on their business strategies and seriously improve their customer relations.


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