Can’t we all just get along?

Lisa Rein quotes a Salon article that I read a few days ago which clearly outlines the problems with iTunes and other pay for download services. I haven’t signed up for any of these yet for the very reasons that he outlines. You can’t play stuff downloaded or ripped with Windows Media Player in iTunes and vice versa. Additionally, the selection is still not what I would like it to be. I’ve purposely used Musicmatch to rip songs into mp3 format to avoid the problems he’s talking about. However, now that Musicmatch is aligned with Dell, I’m not sure how long that will be an option. All of this is just going to drive the file swapping underground. The easiest way to deal with this is form private groups of people with similar music tastes and distribute the wealth among the members. For instance, I buy a CD, rip it and share it with my small group of friends and then they do the same. It should be relatively easy, especially for those with their own FTP sites. Plus, there’s still tons of other alternatives.