"The Music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There is also a negative side.
" -Hunter S Thompson

Labels, those glorified loan sharks, ran to the government when their music sales started drooping like an aging whore. They're proposing laws to protect their stake in the analog music industry, growing increasingly obsolete. "Those Internet punks are stealing our sales, " they whine. "Technology is digging our grave!" They are demanding, and might very well get, "preventative" government intervention in our homes. (If terrorism didn't necessitate government programs monitoring our computers, exactly where in the "human catastrophe" scale does ripping MP3s fall?) Years ago the music moguls embraced the anti-establishment scene because rebellion sold records; they hyped up the "alternative" scene, they felt our pain, man. It must've been the week the post office truck dented their Lexus, because they sure as hell are pro-establishment now. Well, listen up, losers: refusing to buy a crappy product does not qualify as theft, just as worshipping teen idols does not qualify as religion, no matter whose image they have been created in. Most music labels pump out load after load of fecal rock, and just because they can super-produce one song into sonic MSG they don't deserve income from it. They deserve their 12-year-old daughter getting treated like a prostitute because she's dressed like Brittany Spears. They deserve haunting visions of Marilyn Manson's penis. They deserve old age and wrinkles and nursing homes. And banishment into obscurity. The music industry is committed to the principles a capitalist society is founded on- making money.

They are not interested in producing music of higher quality. Most of the consumer public wouldn't recognize quality if it sat on their face and wiggled real pretty, anyway. Their driving force is product consumed in mass quantity, regardless of artistic merit. Welcome to The Jungle, indeed. The industry argues it's helping the poor little artists fight the theft of their hard work by deadbeat net-junkies, ignoring the fact that most of the artists indentured to these labels never see any profit from the first million or so albums sold anyway. I'm not a musician, but I have musician friends despite the fact that I'm a loudmouth jerk who writes articles like this.

They don't make any money and they are amazingly talented. I know an industrial musician whose entire new album was posted on-line, available for download; he claims he lost thousands in album sales. Some of this guy's work is genius, but he's also put out boring 60-minute sagas of blips and beeps; the polarity is disappointing. Free stuff will never disappoint you. Musicians in love with making music will continue to make music regardless of whether there will ever be a payoff. Most art is not, and never will be, profitable for the artist. They are trying to produce something of value, something of beauty. The promise of money or oral sex, while perhaps providing motivation, will not guarantee quality. A true artist goes into it hoping for recognition and appreciation. Although I'm sure the oral sex would go over well.

I'm writing this article to bitch about how stupid the music industry is getting, about how old and lame they are. I 'm laughing at their hissy fitting, I'm positive I will never be more than slightly bothered by any new laws the government sees fit to pass. I live in constant sin, not because I'm a bad person, but because I'm too lazy to find out what's legal this year and what's not. Rules don't concern me, at one time alcohol was prohibited but you could buy cocaine or opium at the corner market. Then, they declared a war on drugs, except the two drugs responsible for the highest percentage of deaths. Obviously it's politics and not intelligence influencing these decisions. I still get high. They raise the speed limits but I still speed. I rest assured that the people on my side are smarter
than the people on the other side, legality be damned! But I don't like your music enough to bother stealing it.