Recently, the global retailer Wal-Mart demanded for the record companies to lower their prices on CD’s. Wal-Mart threatened to stop carrying these CD’s if the record companies kept them at the prices they are now. Most music CD’s sell for thirteen or fourteen dollars. Some of the discounted or special CD’s cost about nine or ten dollars. Wal-Mart wants to sell these CD’s for no more than ten dollars. Some of the discounted CD’s would sell for five dollars. And, of course, the record companies are not buying it.

And why should they? They are, after all, responsible for the state the music industry is in right now. Artists work hard for their “hits” and deserve huge paychecks, right? At the end of the day, it is very difficult to buy solid gold swimming pools when you’re selling your CD’s at ten dollars each. Therein rests the problem.

For many years, record companies controlled the distribution and production of all music. If you wanted to hear Bob Seger, you had to buy a Bob Seger album. There was only one place to get these and only one company to produce them. People bought vinyl, cassette tapes, and eight-tracks. This cycle went on for many years. The record companies did not break a sweat until the nineteen nineties. During this period, people began using the World Wide Web to distribute and produce their own music.

The record companies did not truly worry until the advent of the CD burner. No longer did people have to buy a CD, as they could just borrow their friends’ copy and make their own duplicate of the CD using equipment that was relatively inexpensive. Of course, the arrival of Napster and other file-sharing websites really scared the record companies. The days of their control were over.

And now, CD prices have become higher due to this great schism. The record companies have whined and moaned about the loss of so much profit throughout this entire ordeal. These companies have made billions of dollars from the artists, consumers, and other people involved with the music industry. And now that people can create and distribute music more easily than ever, these companies are terribly upset.

For years, consumers have been at the mercy of the record companies. We paid what they asked us to pay. If we didn’t, we did not get the music. And now they are angry because they cannot charge whatever they want anymore, thus creating a problem for them if they were looking forward to million-dollar paychecks this year. I say that people should have the music the way they want to have it. I am tired of music industry “professi-onals” telling us what should be a hit and what should not. I think it’s high time that people choose what they want to hear; instead of having the record industry telling them what they should hear. Wal-Mart’s actions seem a little radical, but they might awaken this problem within industry executives and could spur the much needed relationship between the consumer and the music industry. At the very least, it could extend the relationship between the two and make it more than just “we make, you buy.”

-Cheers