Has Big Music hit rock bottom?
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- “They say it is often the darkest before the dawn; and just as an addict has to hit bottom before committing to recovery, the music industry needed to be shocked into facing the new realities,” says Bruce Houghton in the MidEmnet blog.
He goes on, “Certainly, there are many holdouts and others who talk the talk, but don’t really walk the walk.”
The implication is: Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music have suddenly been faced with something startling and new.
The reality, however, is: they’ve been looking down the gun barrel ever since deciding they could easily take control of online music distribution by launching their bizarre sue ‘em all marketing campaign under which music lovers would be terrorised into toeing the corporate line.
Six years on, they’re no closer to achieving viable corporate online music businesses than they were at the beginning while smart musicians — many of them former label sign-ups who saw the light — and independents are making hay and establishing themselves firmly in the real world of online music.
Adds Houghton:
“Despite all of the real gloom and doom; the sky is not falling on the music industry. Gone are the helicopter rides from Cannes to Monaco for lunch; and MIDEM may have to start running buses from the train station instead of just from the airport. But this was always about the music. Some of us just let the money get in the way.”
As he points out, addicts do indeed need to hit rock bottom before they start on the road to recovery, using the famous 12 steps.
Will the labels and their various RIAA clones do the same? Will they now talk the talk having failed to walk the walk?
If so, among other things, they’ll have to:
- Admit they’re powerless over their addiction – their unquenchable thirst for money
- Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of themselves
- Admit the exact nature of their wrongs
- Make a list of all persons they’ve harmed, and be willing to make amends to them all
- Continue to take personal inventory and when they were wrong, promptly admit it
Will they succeed?
Don’t hold your breath. And no need to stay tuned.
(Cheers, marjae on Twitter.)
MidEmnet – Bruce Houghton: Why Am I Still Optimistic About The Music Industry?, May 11, 2009
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May 11th, 2009 at 11:30 am
Rock bottom will be when they can’t buy new luxury cars and are filing for bankruptcy en masse.
The challenge is to stop the government from bailing them out.
May 11th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
It’s impossible for either the labels, OR those nominally “running” them, to change course, and the reason is built into corporate capitalism itself:
1. Corporations are explicitly designed to ONLY be able to “think” about profit — specifically, short-term profit. Everything else (social consequences of their actions, the fact they’ve completely alienated their potential customer-base, etc.) gets dumped into a big pile called “externalities”, and is for somebody ELSE to deal with — usually governments, which exist in a symbiotic relationship with the corporations they create; Governments create corporations, grant vast privileges (such as limited liability, corporate ‘personhood’ etc.), and basically get corporations to do their dirty-work for them (Blackwater International for example).
It goes the other way, too: we all know how corporate “persons” such as the RIAA member-companies always run crying to government whenever they might actually have to live up to THEIR side of the copy”right” bargain by allowing something to ‘lapse’ into the public domain, and the whole patent-system is nothing but a mechanism for some companies to shake other companies down.
Patents and copy”rights” are the surest indication that capitalism is NOT — and has NEVER BEEN — a “free” market.
But like I was saying, corporations very literally cannot deviate BY DESIGN, from pursuing whatever they perceive to be the quickest route to the maximum profit, no matter what the consequences. There was an extremely telling quote in that film “the corporation” (the one that I posted the link to a while back). Basically, it said that any corporation whose CEO attempted to take the social consequences of the corporation’s actions into account had better find a different CEO, fast. (I think it was one of the big-names in the “Libertarian” movement who said that, but I can’t remember the name, and don’t really want to sit through the entire movie again just to find out.)
So corporations AS SUCH are congenitally incapable of taking ANYTHING but short-term profitability into account (other than as some kind of half-assed, token gesture that doesn’t actually impact profits — and is thus, meaningless.)
So they can NEVER “admit they have a problem’, because from their perspective (THE WAY THEY ARE DESIGNED), their only ‘problem’ is an inability to squeeze maximum profit by any and all means.
They also can’t make a “searching and fearless moral inventory”, because they ARE living up to their one and only moral tenet: “thou shalt squeeze the nickel ’til the buffalo shits.”
Nor can they change course, UNLESS the new course is demonstrably MORE profitable, in an even shorter time-frame.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0218-01.htm
Quote from the above:
————-
“The filmmakers juxtapose well-shot interviews of defenders and critics with the reality on the ground — Charles Kernaghan in Central America showing how, for example, big apparel manufacturers pay workers pennies for products that sell for hundreds of dollars in the United States — with defenders of the regime — Milton Friedman looking frumpy as he says with as straight a face as he can — the only moral imperative for a corporate executive is to make as much money for the corporate owners as he or she can.
Others agree with Friedman. Management guru Peter Drucker tells Bakan: “If you find an executive who wants to take on social responsibilities, fire him. Fast.” And William Niskanen, chair of the libertarian Cato Institute, says that he would not invest in a company that pioneered in corporate responsibility.
Of course, state corporation laws actually impose a legal duty on corporate executives to make money for shareholders. Engage in social responsibility — pay more money to workers, stop legal pollution, lower the price to customers — and you’ll likely be sued by your shareholders. Robert Monks, the investment manager, puts it this way: “The corporation is an externalizing machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing machine (shark seeking young woman swimming on the screen). There isn’t any question of malevolence or of will. The enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it was designed.”
————
Realistically, the only way the RIAA member companies could change course at all, would be for government to revise — or outright repeal — the legal framework dictating what corporations are, and what they are PERMITTED to do.
But so long as they’re legal “persons”, that’s exceedingly unlikely to happen.
May 12th, 2009 at 12:12 am
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
“I’m not John McCain, and I approve that message!”
(@Henry: Perfect outine of a key problem with this world!)
May 13th, 2009 at 2:47 am
The sooner the MAFIAA die the better.
June 1st, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Music has not hit rock bottom. some people need to exspand there outlook and stop singing about sex and drugs. there is more to life then drinking a beer and going to a club. People should sing more about what is happining in the world instead of talking about how much you want to dance like a stripper. alternative music is the answer!
LEARN SOME NEW MUSIC