Elvis Costello And Others @ SXSW Discuss The Last Days Of The Music Industry

In a report about SXSW and the future of the music business, WashingtonPost.com’s Robert McMillan writes in his Random Access column that "The Who declared that rock is dead, so long live rock. Elvis Costello named the murderer — high-speed Internet."

"Liverpool’s second-most acerbic pop star isn’t the first person to make this observation, but after nearly three decades of paying the rent on vinyl, tape and silicon, he is familiar enough with the way the music industry works to know when the vital signs are off. Costello, who made his remarks at the just-concluded South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival in Austin, Texas, said the end was nearer than many think."

"As soon as broadband is big enough, the record (retailing) business is over," Costello said, according to the Hollywood Reporter. "They will have to change or die … It’s going to be about five minutes to the end. All bets are off." Costello also said that "music chains like Tower Records had ‘let the spirit go out of it.’"

"…the artists and industry bigwigs who gathered at SXSW last week certainly accomplished much hand-wringing in the few hours a day they weren’t hitting the music clubs along Sixth Street, as Michael Grebb reported for Wired.com. "In some cases, talk focused on opportunities. But in many other instances, panelists warned about the perils and uncertainty that face both the artistic and business sides of the industry — especially when it comes to peer-to-peer file sharing," Grebb wrote."

"It’s a familiar lyric for anyone who’s followed the whole file-sharing/P2P/piracy debate over the past few years. There’s the concerned voice of the music industry, claiming also to speak for the poor (or rich) artists trying to make or keep their daily bread: "It’s stopping new artists from coming forward, and it’s killing mid-level artists across the board," said Jay Rosenthal, a music attorney at Washington, D.C.-based Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe and a board member of the Recording Artists Coalition. And then there’s Wendy Seltzer from the live-free-or-die school at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who, Grebb reported, said "lawsuits against those who trade or enable the trading of copyright music files online will continue to have little effect on P2P traffic."

"…all the posturing and arguing at events like SXSW is well-intentioned but ultimately irrelevant. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t compose or play music for money and my livelihood doesn’t depend on the survival of the music industry, so I’m at liberty to be cavalier about this: Composers will continue to compose, musicians will continue to play. The smart ones among them will find ways to get rich or at least make a living, and smart businesspeople will find new ways to exploit the ones who can read a score but not a balance sheet. That in turn will preserve the centuries-old tradition of singers writing songs about getting screwed because they’re singers. And that will give Jay Rosenthal, Wendy Seltzer and others like them reason to keep fighting over the future."