The record industry has long since passed the point of actually caring whether it makes any friends. The latest episode in a PR catalogue of disasters is the successful out-of-court settlement with low-price online CD retailer CD WOW whereby the UK-based, Hong Kong-owned company will add a £2 surcharge to any CD delivered to the UK.
The reasons given have a lot to do with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988… I’ll have to take their word for it, because I don’t see much that relates to the cross-territory sale of legitimate recorded media. The upshot, though, is that British people are being denied one method of benefitting from the great potential of e-commerce. Enthusiastic capitalists like to celebrate the self-governing power of the Free Market, but this is yet another example of how those same capitalists reserve the right to sneak in a touch of command economy when things don’t go their way.
Rumour has it that Amazon.com could be next to incur the wrath of the BPI (if you get your calculations right, you can save by buying from the US-based .com branch, rather than the .co.uk branch, even taking into account the extra shipping costs). But where buying CDs from Amazon.com is like bringing goods back from your US holiday and sneaking through the green channel, CD WOW is a *uk-based* company, selling CDs which have been legitimately bought wholesale within the EU. They’re cheap because they’re bought in bulk.
The whole thing is laughable, and the BPI may as well replace their bloated, confused Flash homepage with a link to Kazaa. Protectionist economic policies are not the future of recorded music in the digital age; companies like Mixonic, CD Baby and Epitonic are.