Hasn't this been said before? Now the record industry can't even be original in their foot-shooting idiocy.

Oh, how these Fair Use laws burn. Like manacles heated to white-hot and put on the arms of billion-dollar corporations.

Whoa! MP3 players are bad because they can hold stolen music. Well, sh*t, my car can hold stolen music. What about a box?

I'd say at least 98% of my music is totally legit. This guy is a total spare.

Propaganda/dogma aside the fact that MS has agreed to give labels a portion of the hardware sales money from the Zune means that they'll want a similar deal from Apple. Should be fun to watch.

Well, it IS theft actually. But that's the way the market works nowadays. So adapt or face the consequences. It's not like they would have any mercy if the new situation would be to their advantage with someone else going bust.

/agree Taoist.

I buy a painfully large number of DVDs in any given year, and have been burning my favorites to my -personal- file server (for use in streaming to a media center connected TV, or more recently, my X360) and am absolutely sick of the DRM that has been becoming more and more prevelant on DVDs and Audio CDs/DVDs. I'd say that I'm about 99% legal (not including a very very small number of songs that I've wanted to find elsewhere - mainly tracks off of movies), and still feel the pains of the nonsense that Sony and other companies use to manage their theoretically private property in the form of strange neat staticy noises and periodic breaks in sound/video. le sigh.

I'll admit that about half of my mp3's are not legal. But to say that all mp3's are stolen or that all mp3 listeners use illegal downloads is not just stupid, it's wrong. Of course, one problem is that idiot music execs believe (or profess to believe) that all ripped music is illegal, even when the person is ripping their own CDs for their own personal use.

Listen to that music exec whine. Awww how cute. The fact is when CD players first came out CD prices were high because the industry didn't know if they were going to catch on as a viable media. Vendors were told that if CDs did catch on the recording companies would eventually lower the price. This never happend. Moreover, CD manufacturing is actually cheaper than other recording methods. They've been overcharging us for CDs for years getting insanely rich. Now a recording method over which they have no control comes out that is better than their proprietary media. They call the adopters of it theives and say they are hurting the artist by using digital transfer. How much money does an artist get from each cd they sell? Someone told me that they make around ten cents on each album, but I really can't verify that. So whos the bigger thief some twelve year old downloading a song legitimately from Itunes or you raping music lovers for years. You even strangled radio, turning it into a corporate nightmare where only music you wanted us to listen to got played. Guess what, we're getting that back too. Nice ride while it lasted, but it's over now. Here's a clue don't call us thieves. Alienating us is not the way to go. Pretty soon we will be getting all our music via some form of file transfer and cds will be dead. Better get used to the fact that the party train has ended.

Wow, did that guy used to work for Sony or something?

What really strikes me is that this guy, and what I'm sure are the legions of idiots like hiim, is either entirely out of touch with the consumer, or an utterly blatant liar, or both. None of which surprises me.

Still, it does blow the mind that he says this stuff. Who's listening? Who's sympathetic? In short, who doesn't own an mp3 player? I do. My fiancee does. My brother does. I think almost everyone I know does. I know there are people in their 60s who have them.

As far as being recepticles for stolen music, it blows my mind that many of the people around my office have never heard of bitTorrent, or P2P software like Kazaa or eMule. They would have no idea how to go about stealing all this music if they wanted to.

The other interesting thing to me is that file sharing was big before mp3 players were. I got my iPod around 2004 or so. Napster was, when, 1999 or so? mp3s came before mp3 players - people were just listening on their computer or burning CDs.

I bought an iPod so that I could have my music library with me at all times - my (98%) legitimate music library.

I agree with souldaddy that digital distribution is a threat to the industry because it can cut them out of the picture, but I have some doubts as to the demise of the CD or other physical media. I still like buying something tangible; right now, I'm not rewarded for buying an album digitally. It's not a lot cheaper, and I have to keep track of the mp3s - iTunes won't let me re-download them if I lose them.

I foresee a spaceship full of middle men, such as this Universal CEO, being sent on a collision course to a far off planet. Don't worry. *struggles to hold in laughter* We're right behind you.

The music industry is becoming more and more like PBS every day.

All media execs think this way. if you recall TiVo first edited commercials when it came out and that industry went crazy. I saw a show last year with one of the Big TV execs and he basically said if you get up during a commercial you were "stealing" TV by missing it. He said he envisioned a future where people would HAVE to watch commercials or they could not watch the show.

Then again, if I was making billions of bucks doing something irrelevent I would fight to keep it also.

I'm afraid problem is not that they are charging obscene amounts of money for a CD full of bland, boring, repetitive, uninspired, run-of-the-mill, cookie-cutter music. The problem is that people are actually willing to buy that crap in huge numbers.