They Thought They Had It Bad

The little icon above is from some inner sleeve that I've long since misplaced, but I remember it came out of a UK LP from the 80's. At the time, the recording industry was sure that cassette tapes were going to destroy the record industry. It was thought that people would record their music off the radio, or from their friend's records, and they wouldn't be able to sell any new albums. I think the upshot of that fear was that a small piece of the purchase price of blank cassettes goes to the record industry to help cover their losses. I believe the same thing is true of music CDRs.

Obviously, they didn't realize how easy they had it back before Shawn Fanning (or Seth Green, perhaps) broke the whole industry wide open with Napster. Ernie recommends Soulseek to help kill the music industry.