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He’s the King Of Pop, there is none higher…

Sucker music pirates should call him… Ally?

The baddest of the bad, Michael Jackson, the same guy who was on the Jackson 5 (In French!), believe it or not, has issued a statement condemming the latest overkill in the file sharing wars. Seems that the Record Industry and some in Congress, notably Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich and Rep. Howard Berman, D-Cali, though I’m betting that there are a couple of GOP types teaming up with these trial lawyers on this legislation.

I’ll admit to having dabbled in Napster and snapped up some doozies such as ‘Oops, I Did It Again’ before Napster was shut down; however, since then I’ve cleaned them off my hard drive. And I’ll admit that I stopped swapping songs because of potential legal action (That, and a couple of really crappy downloads, and the arrivial of some decent, legal alternatives). However, federal prison seems excessively harsh to me for swiping a couple of MP3’s.

I’m firmly behind intellectual property rights, but I’d be willing to bet that the drop off in CD sales is more closely tied to the recession in 2000 than to file sharing. The failure to rebound could be a result of the industry publishing crap (with a few exceptions). Who wants to buy ‘My Diary” et al to get ‘Oops?’

Used to be that you could grab a 45 with the hit you wanted. CD singles never really reached their potential. I firmly put the blame for this on the Record Companies (who never passed along the cost savings gained by switching to CD’s from tapes and LP’s) for keeping prices of CD singles up there with prices of entire albums on cassette. Apple’s Music Store has a model which might be able to re-capture the market for 45’s, and bring back the separation between the album artist and the one-hit wonder.