Record labels, again… SIGH…
Every time you think record labels are finally, possibly, just maybe beginning to ‘get it’, you see a bit of news like this (from techcrunch) – “Record labels pressure Spotify to restrict service”… oh for f***’s sake, here we go again…
Spotify, if you didn’t know, is a new-ish music service barely out of invite-only stage, based in Sweden. You could stream tracks, create playlists, search the database of millions of songs and listen to exactly what you wanted and when.
In return, Spotify (and the labels & artists) would receive money through either advertising, or a premium subscription service where the user would pay for no adverts.
And so, in their wisdom, the labels (or at the very least one of them) seem to be driving people away from a legal, revenue generating service and back into piracy, because the new way of doing business won’t make them the same money as the old way of doing business…
The truth is the model that the record industry like, where they could charge £15 per album, and sell the physical, uncopyable product, has been over for years. If they can’t make enough money to run their bloated, horrible, asset-fixated organisations through the new channels, then they should give up and go home.
Because there are some people out there who understand that the new world is a lot different, and they still see a way to connect bands to people… read the music industry manifesto, and see what I mean.
Anyway, to end on a Benkler quote:
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“As economic policy, allowing yesterday’s winners to dictate the terms of tomorrow’s economic competition would be disastrous. As social policy, missing an opportunity to enrich democracy, freedom and justice in our society while maintaining or even enhancing our productivity would be unforgivable”
<o:p></o:p>Yochai Benkler, ‘The Wealth of Networks’<o:p></o:p>
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