Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Years after Napster, the major labels still seem to believe that heavy handed negotiations and lawsuits are the answer to the downturn.
I left MidemNet and Midem last month with a certain sense of hope. The "insiders" were telling me that the music industry had finally moved beyond confrontation to collaboration. See, for example at how well mobile and the music industry are working together.
But given recent moves by the recording industry from Muxtape to pulling videos from YouTube, a well as, a number of new lawsuits against music tech startups prove that my optimism was unfounded. I've just written about this troubling trend on the MidemNet blog in "Are We Really Moving From Control To Collaboration?", so I won't repeat my arguments here.
Music industry consultant Ted Cohen of TAG Strategic also chose the
MidemNet blog to express his concern that labels and licensing are
stifling innovation. As Ted states, "It's Time To Get On The Same Page". Ted is 100% correct. Particularly with all of the lessons learned and so much at stake, why can't we all just get along?
The Midem team has decided to keep their blog active year round to
provide the global music industry with a place for opinion and discussion. This discussion will continue there as well as here on Hypebot. After all, the first step away from confrontation towards collaboration is communication.
Regretfully, I don’t think we can just get along.
I’m not advocating conflict but there are those who actually who make, play and sell music and those who don’t and this industry is no longer big enough for the two of us.
If you are one of the myriad of unsuccessful managers, get out.
If you are one of the thousands of A n’R who have kept your job despite never having seen a band out of the red, into the black and into their 3rd record, get out.
If you work for any of these gaggle of lobbying groups, intermediaries, advocacy panels, “agencies”, who seem to be everywhere doing nothing, get out.
If you think the writers share should be commissioned, get out.
If you subsidize your life with the trickle from an array of intellectual properties without focusing on making one or 2 of them a breakout priority you are a barnacle king…Pharaoh, let my people go.
It’s cute that we’ve gone from Stalinist lawsuits to murmurs of a peace summit, but it’s too late, always was. The business can no longer support the weight of the remora and in order to survive a lot of sucker fish are gonna have to go get another job, in another sector of the economy far far away from music.
That is the only way for music to recover as a cultural and retail art form…..lots and lots of fat trimming.
brendan b brown
wheatus.com
Brendan has a point. Getting along would be nice, but realistically how can we expect an entity to just kill itself? It’s kinda against it’s best interest. It’s like a divorce where one party says “I need to grow and I can’t do it in this relationship.” The other party feels the pain and destructive strategies feel better. There will always be creators and artists who believe the “conventional wisdoms” that they can’t make it without the kingmakers, but what’s happening with ‘net and tech is not just new wave, it’s a tsunami.