The battle over digital downloading continues and we won’t likely see the end of it anytime soon. While sites like Apple‘s iTunes Music Store offer legal downloads for a small price per song, P2P (or “peer-to-peer”) networks freely trade audio files, for which the recording artists never receive royalties. The RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) has a big problem with that, as does the Grateful Dead, a band which once supported fans who mailed cassettes of their concerts to each other. In fact, the Dead even went so far as to set aside an area at their concerts where fans could go to do their recordings. So what’s changed? According to the New York Times, the problem got out of hand when Live Music Archive created a Web site that has thousands of Dead shows available for download. And with the advent of high-speed internet connections, downloading an entire concert is no longer impossible. All that’s required is a little time and some hard disk space.
The band’s publicist told the Times that it’s not a financial decision, but rather a philosophical one. He stressed the fact that the band has always been okay with one-to-one community building via tape trading, but want to head off the development of a massive, one-stop Web site where everyone can go and download as much as they want, which is clearly a cold, impersonal way of sharing music. The band understands that fans who cannot get to every concert will want access to these performances, so they have opened up their own archives where people can go to download high quality concert recordings at very reasonable prices.
