Legal vs. Pirated Music

Once again, the cigar smoking caviar eating music industry (so-called) gurus met, scratched their heads (if not their fat bellies), and came up with a decision on not to increase the royalty rates for digital downloads until 2012 (5 more years of the beloved DRM).
P2P downloads are soaring faster than my imaginary supercharged 1969 Dodge Charger, album leaks are happening as I am writing this post and as you are reading it, and retail stores are decreasing their music space by the mile.

Short history, the compact disc was introduced to the market in 1982 by Philips with a little help from Sony (the first album was The Visitors by Abba), and more than 200 billion CDs have been sold since that day.
In the year 2000, they introduced a copy protection technology for the CD, adopted mostly by EMI, and worked only on Microsoft Windows (Linux OS users were the happiest), to get to the conclusion that this technology led to increased illegal downloads, which nobody had noticed at that time because they were too busy thinking "how can we make it harder for people to buy original music?".

So now physical sales are down, and digital sales are going up (for now), and the latter mentioned fat guys are thinking the same latter question "how can we make it harder for people to buy original music"? Majors are still using the DRM technology (copy protection for digital media), except for EMI, but still, 3 out of the 4 majors are still using it. They basically started the same technology that made people shift from physical CDs to illegal downloads, but this time, they introduced it from day one, making digital downloads look like an "elite" form of buying music, which is only available for a certain amount of people in certain places on this globe.

Let me get this straight, if I want to buy the new Metallica album digitally, legally, on mp3 format, I have to do the following.
- Go live in North America or some parts of Europe, get a credit card from any of the mentioned countries, buy an iPod which I'm totally against, install iTunes on my PC or laptop which will certainly slow down my media management on the machine, go to the iTunes online store, create an account, pay and download protected content which will ONLY play on Apple products such as the iPod that I was forced to purchase or the iTunes that I was forced to install.
- Or, illegally download the new Metallica album, for free, from any P2P agent, on unprotected mp3 format, that I can play on any machine of my choice.

All these points, and they're still thinking twice about the DRM issue, and how they can fill their pockets, because I'm so sure that they know that the digital music industry is heading the same way the physical industry took in 2000, so they're trying to make the best out of it from the beginning.

Doesn't it open your eyes, that the same company who adopted the protection technology, is the first one to eliminate it in the digital business?

Don't get me wrong, I work in the music industry and I'm totally against illegal downloads, but they're forcing people to do it, protecting music is hurting legal music lovers, because hackers will always find a way to bypass any DRM protection.