As piracy and regulation clash, the march of modern media continues relentlessly to an unknown future. A friend shared this exchange with me, this is the modern media story:

An ad plays relentlessly on CNN. After a while I realise the ad doesn’t bother me because I like the tune.

I whip out my phone. Click Shazam. Click search. It recognizes the song. Even with the ambient noise it tells me the Artist is Vashti Bunyan (never heard of her) and the song is Train Song.

Open Firefox on my laptop. Type Amazon.com. Search: “vashti bunyan”.

I opt for what looks to be like her greatest hits album: Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind (Singles & Demos 1964-1967) Listen to the samples of the album. It’s good. I want it.

Copy. Click Google. Paste. Type in “torrent”. Search: “Vashti Bunyan Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind torrent”

Open the first result. Download the torrent file. Load the torrent file in Transmission, a torrent client for Mac.

The album starts to download, estimated time 15 minutes.

I browse Amazon in the meantime. Maybe there is more to this, more to mine. I find that Feist (an artisit I like) has done a cover of Train Song.

I listen to the sample. It’s great, got to have it. Listen to some of the other tracks on the album. They’re ok.

Repeat download steps…

‘Ping’, first album has landed. Plug it into iTunes. Start listening. Send to my iPod so long to listen in my car.

Before I finished listening to the album, ‘ping’ the second album has landed.

It’s not so much the cost, but the speed and ease. If she wanted this album on iTunes she couldn’t have it, because you cant open an account with a South African based credit card. There are ways around this but… meh.

I’ve been reminiscing about my youth, in ‘record shops’, quoting obscure lyrics hoping that one of the eccentric staff would know the song I was looking for. People would listen to the music on some banged up old communal headphones if there was a spot available. The cost and especially the time and effort meant you made very sure about the music before committing.

It was great, but that romance is gone now.

Now we have instant access, amazing ways to search and sort, everything can be traced, nothing is out of reach. As bandwidth gets faster and devices hold more, it will become even easier. It’s a matter of time before we’re downloading HD movies on our phones while we’re in the grocery checkout… the question is whether it be done legally or not.

The internet’s uncontrollable tide is spreading faster than politicians and record companies can comprehend the situation let alone control it: from the fake DVDs sold on the side of the road to people using external hard drives to share terabytes of music in one sitting, to movies split into ten-minute clips on YouTube.

The solution doesn’t seem to be in sight yet. There are good ideas out there but none go “pow! This is it”.

The idea of subscription makes a lot of sense, where for example you could pay iTunes $10/month to listen to any music on any of your devices but none of it will live on your devices. It will be streamed seamlessly from the internet or cloud.

This model or similar ones makes sense but fundamentally changing peoples’ behaviour will be the key challenge. How do you get people to buy into something new if they are currently happy and the new option is fraught with unknown obstacles?

One of the few things that is clear is that American lawmakers at present have the wrong approach. Trying to strong-arm the nameless faceless citizens of the internet, who answer to no government is fruitless.

I imagine any successful solution will be demand lead. It has to be so good that people chose to cross over. That means it must be cheap, convenient, have all the key content and be incredibly easy to adopt. Any ideas?