Looks like the Recording Industry Association of America is changing it’s strategy of suing individuals who are caught downloading pirated music. In a recent statement, they stated that no new lawsuits will be filed against individual - I guess all of the bad press, high cost and ineffectiveness of the campaign has come to roost. The new strategy involves working directly with Internet Service Providers to “warn” people of illegal activity.

The truth is that the downloading networks have gotten progressively worse over the years and to both find and download a significant amount of clean music is more difficult than ever. File sharing has never gone mainstream and you can’t stop people from swapping CDs and ripping them onto their computers.

As we’ve said before in this blog, the barriers to entry and control of the physical CD is no longer a viable and sustainable business. Subscription services like Rhapsody are one model for improvement and fairness while the iTunes pay as you go model is another. We will also see much more music skipping the record industry middle man and go right to the people via the internet.