Tecno Brega

If you want to see the future of popular music, and the death rattle of its domination by clueless record companies, check out this article from CNN.com. Aside from the joy of the music itself and the excitement of a business model that puts money into the pockets of artists for a change, there's the fun of seeing the spiraling absurdity of the victimization complaints made by the recording industry. For example, the article quotes "Brazil's Anti-Piracy Association" as claiming a loss of two million jobs per year for the Brazilian economy. Of course, modern journalists rarely bother to check numbers, but if they had, the CNN writers would've noticed that, with a labor force of around 82 million in 2003, two million jobs would represent nearly 2.5% of the entire labor force put out of work by "piracy". Or, with unemployment at around 10% per year, the claim is that nearly a quarter of the unemployed can blame their problems on copyright violation!

There's a documentary about the Tecno Brega phenomenon and related copyright/culture issues here.