Comment Longer answer (Score 4, Informative) 309
Here's a few options:
- Start treating the indies and non-"top 40 list" artists with respect.
- Stop putting out crap content that isn't worth the price they want to price-fix it at.
- Bring back the single (why do you think iTunes and similar do so well? Because most of the time only one song on the album is any good if it's a MafiAA-produced album).
- Start making the production value of CD's worthwhile again. This means put in proper cover art, lyric sheets, etc rather than just a tiny scrap of paper. Also, stop pushing the normalized volume of the recording so fucking high that it clips out and sounds like crap. Master them lower and retain audio fidelity, thanks.
- Sign some fucking new artists for god's sakes.
There's also one thing I'd love to see happen from the government's end, which would be to reinstate the radio station ownership rules. It used to be, there were over 5000 different radio companies in the US. Now, 98% of the US market is owned by only 5 companies; the biggest and crappiest, "Clear Channel", owns over 50% of the market.
You want to know why your radio sucks today? Because you don't GET local shows any more. There are a small handful of local shows, and the rest is either national-syndicated talk radio (schlesinger, limbaugh, hannity, beck, savage, etc), "top 40" generic shit "music" stations with pre-recorded loops and a guy three states away "reading your local news" to you, or "niche top 40" crap we get down here based on exploiting some racial group (local stations we have here: "La Raza", aka "The Race", the vilest racist mexican Aztlan-movement shit you've ever heard, and "the Box", which is all (c)Rap music about killing cops and regularly features "guest" appearances of the local New Black Panthers leader).
Clear Channel moves into a city, cuts all the employees, pretty much just sets up the stations on automatic reproduction of their master feed, and forgets about you. They get an almost "captive audience" of commuters, and that's that. In many local markets, there is no such thing as "competition" any more because CC owns the entire area.
Reinstate the media ownership rules; make it so we get REAL local music stations again, with REAL DJ's who make their OWN daily playlists, occasionally spin a whole album, and maybe (just maybe) there will be a better chance for music to spread.
Of course, the MafiAA loves media consolidation. That way, they send just one gift basket to one person and get Britney Spears' latest pile of crap spinning on half the stations in the US for five weeks or more, and lock the independent artists completely out of the system much easier. Gyah.