Thursday, October 12, 2006

Oh - Those Good Old Days

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My cassette picture reminded me of the this one. The golden early 80's where the record labels predicted the death of music for the first time as millions of teenagers grabbed their cassette recorders & copied each other's albums with impunity. Even the mighty Quincy Jones got into the fray, standing before a judiciary committee and claiming that without protective legislation the days of the 5 million plus selling album were over (bad news Quince, your Thriller album, released later that year went on to sell over 25M in the US alone). He even supported the insertion of an audio notch at 3KHz ("that no one could hear") into all recordings which would disable the record feature on cassette decks.

Of course the music industry didn't die. In fact, following MTV & the CD introduction, they went on to make more profits then ever before. But the rhetoric was not so surprisingly similar to what we hear today about file sharing, downloading, bit torrents and broadcast flags. "Our business model isn't working so we need regulators to step in and save it."

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