Grokster goes down, MySpace Goes Up - Music Biz still having nightmares

I know it's been awhile since I posted here, but I've been busy. Hehe.

Anyway, catching up on my Wired RSS feed, and put a couple of articles together in my head just now.

The first is this article about the evil RIAA finally getting Grokster shut down. My first reaction, being "that sucks." And yes, even as a person who makes their living by copyrighted property, I don't believe in the way that copyright is presently being protected by Congress. That's another conversation however.

So, I was reading the above article, and thinking for just a second that the record companies won... and then I flashed back to another article I'd just read, about MySpace and music. And how bands were suddenly making livings selling runs of albums that were as little as 50,000 copies... and how a place with 29 million users creates a demographic that DOESN'T NEED THE RECORD INDUSTRY to tell them what's cool, and what they should buy.

Moreover, if the record industry DID come into the space and try to tell them what's cool - the users would crucify them.

So my thought of the day is that community-based sites like MySpace are far more of a threat to the record labels than peer-to-peer ever was. HA! Take that record labels.