The media distribution of digital age

Yesterday Garbage put out their favorite songs playlist on MOG. I wanted to check it out. When I connected some sort of flash player started loading. Then it stopped and told me to use a "modern browser", such as Firefox or Chrome. I have Opera, which is 99 % similar in showing webpages like these two mentioned (in fact, Opera and Firefox have more in common than these two supported by MOG).

I loaded up my RockMelt, which is a browser based on Chromium core. The player loaded, but only to tell me that I can't view MOG outside US.

I tried Pandora. It's the same. Only they apologize and promise to "set things right" as soon as possible. Instead of insulting you and the browser you use, like MOG does.

Today Diablo Swing Orchestra uploaded their new single exclusively to Spotify. Guess what? US only.


I'll tell you who hurts the music industry the most. Who is responsible for most of intellectual property infringement. It's the copyright holders.

There is NO legal way for me to get the DSO single.
And there's NO way at all for me to see the Garbage playlist. I could find new groups and buy their albums.

With the great number of quality artists and music nowadays the classic market model - record stores and CDs is unsustainable. The price could never be brought down enough to make money. Quite the opposite, price would rise whereas the sales would fall down.
You can see that in CZ. There is no online way to get the albums, which results in monopoly of record stores, pretty much of one record store chain. The albums are, and now I am not kidding at all, up to 10 TIMES AS EXPENSIVE AS IN GB OR US.
I could buy albums from US or pretty much anywhere and get it shipped overseas. The shipping price would be far higher than the price of the album itself, but it would still be a lot cheaper than buying it here.

I support online services such as the aforementioned music ones - Spotify or Pandora and as well the movie services, such as netflix. I see the future of digital media there. The expenses are far lesser and the margin of the companies behind it is way smaller, which means cheaper and more money for artists.

I am worried, though, that re-writing all the copyright deals or even laws will take a long time. Since this situation is still quite convenient for the record stores owners, we're gonna have to go through a crisis to escape this model.
Expect the high numbers of piracy even rise.
That is, of course, if the service providers based mostly in US won't step up. Which I don't expect to happen anytime in close future, since they have enough troubles now gaining a higher percentage of music/movie sales in US. When there's no room to expand there, they'll move onto smaller markets, such as the European markets are.