onger and more imaginative view. It's not as if the status quo has served them so well. Today a popular recording artist is basically a participant in a lottery, rigged by the music conglomerates, with a tiny likelihood of winning a vast fortune and overwhelmingly more likely odds of achieving only obscurity and peanuts in royalties.Even more than the artists, the victims of this system are music fans -- who end up paying exorbitant prices for CDs to fund bloated recording-company marketing budgets. That money gets spent manufacturing a handful of superstars, leaving serious music lovers to fend for themselves in ferreting out unusual new music that the business considers too "niche-y" to be worth promoting.This is the landscape onto which the MP3 movement and Napster have arrived -- one filled with howls of outrage from fans. Write about this subject on the Net, as I did a couple of months ago, and your e-mail will overflow with their complaints about the way things have been, and relief at the changes the new technologies portend:*"Why should I have to pay $17 for one good song while the rest suck? Maybe it's time that the public decides what's good instead of being force-fed by the big boys."*"I'm sick of hearing these crybaby millionaires moaning about fans ripping them off. Fans deserve it, they paid their dues. And this is ultimately about fans, isn't it? Without us, those greedy musicians don't have a dime."*"Technological innovations give people the power to filter through the crap that the recording industry has been packaging as music in the need to satisfy contracts or to ride or create the latest hot trend."*"People have found a way to share music and lower the expense. Let the system adjust or die. The revolution is here and I dare you to try and take it away."Sure, the rhetoric's overheated, but remember -- these are music lovers who should be the industry's most lucrative customers, not its sloganeering adversaries. Does ...
