How to stop music "stealing" ?

Long ago here's how it happened. Buy an album, put it in, and groove to your new treat. And as your sitting on that comfy sofa, listening to those booming speakers unleash fresh tunes, you skim the liner notes. It's simple, a standard music junkie experience.

And now with online music stores, what do we have? The same experience. Some, such as iTunes, are even beginning to offer digital music booklets, a newer version of liner notes. But why stop there?

1) Online music stores can attach almost everything they want to downloads. Album or song purchases should be attached to tour schedules, artist stories and biographies, videos, games, screensavers, drawings, desktop backgrounds, coupons, anything of interest.

2) Songs files can be made for more than listening. Fans like to interact with their music. What if you could download a song file, and then sing karaoke with it, play the guitar solo from it in Guitar Hero, dance to it in DDR, create your own music video for it, remix it and resell your reproductions. All of these abilities in a single interface.

If an album offered more attachments and interactivity in a hard to reproduce environment, than fans would gravitate from "stealing" towards the superior product. Many people who download newly released movies still go to theaters for the experience—it's better.

The record companies can improve the music experience or they can spend their time catching clueless teenagers. Which do you think deserves more emphasis?

It begins.

I've always been fascinated with the Russian Mp3 sites. Through a combination Russian loopholes and lack of enforcement, they are able to transparently sell Mp3s at a much lower price than their American competitors. But not only do they sell Mp3s for low prices, but they also design websites and clients (especially Allofmp3.com) that rival or are perhaps superior to those that are RIAA approved. They demonstrate what can be done without restrictions, no DRM, different file types and qualities, longer (or full) previews, generous bonuses, and innovative pricing structures.

Now, a restriction free music world is frightening to artists and record companies. They lose control of what becomes of their work; they lose profit models; they lose their whole current infrastructure. An industrial revolution is fun for the consumers, but content owners aren't quite ready for radical change.

It is my understanding that the Russian Websites donate some of their profits to a pool for rights-holders, who could claim money for their works, but by doing so would legitimize the sale of their works. Thus, not much money (if any) goes to rights-holders from the Russian Sites and the music industry. The RIAA obviously isn't happy about their existence and with the new U.S. trade agreement with Russia, I find it hard to believe that these Russian Mp3 Sites will be able to continue to operate effectively, if it all, for the next couple years. The credit card companies have already made it harder to pay Allofmp3.com. You currently can only pay Allofmp3 by going through XROST, a third party. Yet, until then, it will be very interesting to follow the websites. There are at least 20 of them.