The music industry, as virginal as ever

Last week saw the fall of a giant. The Union Square Virgin Megastore, the last holdout of the big record stores in New York City, closed its doors forever. The death throes of the British colossus sent tremors through the entire record industry, an entity long suffering depleted sales and maligned image.

I personally spent a lot of time in this store. In college I whiled away countless hours in the café reading comic books and not paying for anything. And that's the problem, really. Not simply that I was allowed to sit and read and not spend, but that I was ok with the whole consumption without purchase arrangement. Hell, I felt entitled to it.

I've purchased music from iTunes. I've bought hundreds of CDs. But for every dollar I've spent on legitimate music media, I've probably illegally downloaded ten dollars worth without batting an eye. I never thought twice about what I was doing. What's worse, when I sit down and think about it, all the music I've "stolen," I don't care at all, not one bit. And almost no one else I know does either.

And you know what? This is as it should be.

I'm not going to wave some fight-the-power, 2600, "the information wants to be free" flag. That would be asinine and wrongheaded. The movement for dramatically cheaper music (and, while we're on the topic, cinema and TV) is a step in the right direction for consumer and producer alike. At present only the consumers are seeing real benefit, but even now that's changing. In the future, the consumer-producer relationship will be much more mutually beneficial.

The history of music has been benchmarked not by new ways of delivering content, but by monetizing it. Paying performers to play in your ballroom, purchasing sheet music, picking up LPs at the five & dime, radio, payola, MTV… it's all been about salability. From promoting content to finding new ways to deliver it to the masses, much music technology innovation has sprung from a simple desire to move more units.

That is, until the Internet came along, with its promise of free and accessible media for all. We all know the story of the democratization of intellectual property: And Usenet begat Napster, and Napster begat BitTorrent, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. A sea change has taken place in the retail world, one that has re-aligned exactly what it is we purchase as a public, and what we consider worthy of purchase. The Internet has rather simply made the following rule: If it's an object that I can touch in the real world, it's going to have a cost attached. If it only exists as data, either in human memory or a computer's, it should be free.

But the internet has not made us into a culture of thieves; it just repositioned views on what should and should not be given away. Music, TV, newspapers, and film, we've decided, ought to be free (or extremely inexpensive). As producers increasingly come to terms with this we'll see them figure out new ways to get some return off us. The page is already starting to turn on the retail music industry...

Just last week Virgin announced it was launching an unlimited download music service in the UK. Right on the heels of its megastore close out. Will it have the clout to take on iTunes? Will it ever compare to the estimated $50 million annual profits that the now-deceased Times Square megastore pulled in? Only time will tell.