It does seem as though the
MP3 revolution is going to change the rules of the game. Many envision a world where your favorite
music is just a mouse-click and several seconds away. Some say this is the world we live in already, which might be somewhat of an exaggeration considering that most of my computer-owning friends either don't know anything about MP3s are just don't know enough to get anything that they actually want on MP3. The ones who do download their music of choice as free MP3s belong to a minority of technological elite. Nonetheless, what's not true for this right moment might very well be a few years or even months short of becoming true.
And so, if one is to try and guess what the outcome of the MP3 revolution might be, one might turn to other instances in history where a popular commodity drops its price from anything to a nice round nothing. Commercial software had almost always cost, but almost since the beginning of commercial software, it was possible to get it for free. I still remember swapping game tapes with local neighborhood kids for my old Atari XL when I was nine. All you needed was a double-deck cassette recorder. Floppies made the process less painful and the Internet had made it sinfully easy. Does commercial software still make money? Yes. And lots of it too.
Take the above paragraph, use music for games, tapes for floppies and you have what the record industry might refer to as "the tape malady". For a tiny fortune, you could replicate all of your friends' music collection. Did music still make money then? Yes. Way more than they should've.
Is this to the credit of a sense of decency on the consumer's part? Fear of the law? Unawarness of the cheaper alternative? Probably for all of those as well as many other reasons. Many people just like having the original. Good karma, makes them sleep better at night knowing that they've done their part in acquiring their media. Would MP3 change that? Possibly. There's no denying that MP3 makes it easier to acquire new music by an order of magnitude. I could tell of how my CD budget has grown to five times its original size ever since I started downloading MP3s. Most of them of artists I've never heard of before and that, furthermore, none of my friends have. These are the small artists. The ones that don't get any play time on MTV or on your favorite radio station. They're the odd birds and you just happened to download something of theirs because it was a mouse-click and several seconds away. You might've then weighed the idea of buying some of their stuff against the idea of scouting the 'net for odd bits and pieces of it, and very possibly decided against the latter.
And yet, this might change as well. It may become very easy to download anything that you're interested in, very easily. It might be that you'd be able to leave the computer on for the night and have a few hundreds of music CDs waiting for you by morning. If I had to guess, I would say -- MP3s are going to push the price of music down. The real victim would be the middlemen, the ones that at the moment monopolize shelf space, and often force the artist to resort to their services if they wish their music to be published. There is no such thing as shelf-space in a virtual world. And for a fraction of what you are paying for your music now, you would be able to get much more, legally, and it's all going to be a mouse-click and several seconds away.