Now with the acquisition of our previously mentioned non-proxied internet conection I found myself in the position of once again being able to download music. Recently however my conscience (pushy little so and so that it is) has been troubling me on the downloading music front, and so I decided to try doing things the legal way. First I installed iTunes, only to be informed that the iTunes store was unavailable in my country (a fact that apple had prominently failed to mention anywhere on their website). Since that was the only music provider that I specifically knew anything about I went to the ARIA website.
Now my rational here was that seeing as the ARIA people were supposed to be the main advocacy group for Ausalian music artists, and were so opposed to illegal downloads, I reasoned that they would be doing everything in their power to promote existing legal alternatives, and as such would have links to online music stores operating within Australia.
How wrong I was – not that I can admit to being overly surprised. After all, it took them something like 5 years to realise that music downloading was something that they weren’t going to be able to stamp out, and was in fact something they were going to be able to make money out of. What I found was that the ARIA site contained not a single mention of how you could download music legally, or even any propoganda espousing the relative virtues of “doing the right thing”, so to speak.
As an industry advocacy group I can only conclude that ARIA are doing a singularly shithouse job of actually advocating anything, and having eventually found some music stores (off my own bat), I was left with the conclusion that even after all this time the music industry still has no concept of what the consumer actually wants, and that if they don’t provide a product that in some way atg least vaguely resembles what the consumer wants, they have next to no chance of ever attracting people away from the existing illegal alternative.