<i>"...after all, licenses shouldn’t be necessary for users to play their own music, right? The labels seem to disagree they expressed shock following Amazon’s announcement, with a Sony Music representative implying that the company was looking into legal options."</i><p>Record companies have lost control over the production as well as the distribution of music. Instead of innovating, they rely on lawyers and lobbyists, shady backroom dealings and secret handshakes, and what amounts to a policy of systemic political and legal bullying to protect their gatekeeper role in producing a product they're no longer needed to produce. Yet they have the nerve to act (or pretend to act) shocked when the world notices that the record company of yore is obsolete; a dinosaur; a wooly mammoth whose time on the evolutionary tree is now happily finished.<p>There are 2 choices here: a) sell people music in a permanent format that doesn't offend them with half-baked notions of quasi-ownership (not being able to play the song on the device of choice, not being able to lend the song to a friend like you would a CD, etc.) and simply deal with whatever profit loss results or b) people will pirate your shit en masse. This is science, and not all the lawyers and lobbyists in the world can change it.