Music lovers call for open formats for downloading (Palm Beach Post, USA)
"2007 is the year that all of the recording companies will drop the pretext and just sell the music in an open format," says Gerd Leonhard, a music industry futurist at www.musicfuturist.com...The music industry has never been an equal marketplace, says industry futurist Leonhard. It's been three or four companies with complete control over the production and artists. They reap "obscene" profits for doing little more than finding the artists.
Now, it's anyone's game. One solution Leonhard suggests is creating digital music subscriptions. Let people download what they want, when they want it, for one flat monthly fee, much like cable television or satellite radio. All of it, though, points further and further away from music retailers. "The problem is," Leonhard says, "they've been on the receiving end of what the recording industry is doing wrong."
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