The 2005 Music Year

"Record companies have never earned as little as they did in 2005 – and there has never been so much good music", Jens Balzer comments with reference to the latest albums by Franz Ferdinand, Rufus Wainwright, Adam Green, Devendra Banhart and Coco Rosie. He goes on to take a closer look at the music industry's new strategies. "As has been the case over the past few years, the big record labels sought to save themselves by criminalising customers. In Germany alone, they sued several thousand 'illegal' file sharers while at the same time employing criminal practices to serve their own purposes. The people at SonyBMG are particularly good at this. On the one hand they tried to boost the use of their products on American radio with a refined system of bribery. On the other they astonished the world with a new copy protection programme which plants itself deep into computer operating systems and then transfers personal data about the CD purchaser to the record label via the Internet."

» more information (external link, German)
More from the press review on the subject » Culture, » Global