David posted recently about record companies shamelessly stealing royalties from their own clients, which as he said, doesn't come as much of a surprise. Starting with the payloa scandals, it seems like the music industry has been corrupt and will always be corrupt.

And while everyone is panicking over their frequent lawsuits over filesharers (although no one has actually stopped downloading mp3s, it seems), it's worth pointing out an ironic positive result of this overreaction.

When I started trading concert tapes (yup, cassette tapes) back in 1995 or so, there were few mp3s online because nobody had broadband connections at home yet. Some stores sold "official" bootleg CDs from fake overseas labels like Kiss the Stone and Moonraker, but these discs weren't on the shelves. You had to ask the disinterested twentysomething behind the counter for their "import" CDs, and after a few moments they'd reach into a cabinet and pull out a cardboard box full of contraband.

In the mid-90's, these bootleg CDs were the big threat to major record labels. "The artists don't get royalties," they'd claim, but in reality they were afraid that they'd lose money to the fly-by-night labels who were skillfully positioned in some faraway land with no copyright laws. In 1996 during the Atlanta Olympics, record labels (led by the Dave Matthews Band, who make a living selling CDs of the same songs over and over again) raided many metro-Atlanta stores and busted them (at least the ones who weren't tipped off in advance) for peddling their unlicensed wares. Legally there wasn't much that the labels could do about us small-time traders, since we weren't selling anything, but there was the occasional rumor of a taper getting shaken down.

With the pervasive spread of broadband internet connections, it became easier for people to share music digitally, and as we all know it wasn't too long before entire albums were available for free before they were even released to the public. Ironically, record companies all of a sudden didn't care about concert tapers anymore. There are websites you can visit nowadays, such as Sharing the Groove and eTree, and download entire concerts in lossless FLAC or SHN format. Yet record companies don't care anymore now that they devote all their time to the crusade against peer-to-peer file sharing.

And as soon as some new technology comes along, they'll forget all about the mp3s that are "destroying their business" and go after that. It's hard to take them seriously anymore.