p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- “There is an ongoing tension between what consumers want and what music labels want,” Mr. Partovi said. “It’s hard to know what model will satisfy both, and what will work over the long run.”

However, there’s no tension. The labels are, to all intents and purposes, Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan) and EMI (Britain), with Warner (US) bringing up the rear.

The Big 4 labels are desperately trying to maintain the status quo — to hold back the tide by maintaining the same business model which served them so well during physical 20th century when they called the shots. All of them.

They want one thing: to acquire an iron grip on how music is distributed online, who does it, and by what means, just as they do offfline, and they’ll stop at nothing, including suing their own customers, to achieve that.

But online, consumers aren’t consumers — that’s to say mindless drones who’ll buy anything and everything shoved in front of them.

They’re customers: people with free choice, the means to shop around and the mindset to make decisions based on what they want rather than what formulaic ‘product’ the Big 4 are trying to foist on them.

Partovi, who runs a startup called iLike, is quoted in a New York Times piece entitled Music Labels Cut Friendlier Deals With Start-Ups.

Reading between the lines of the headline, you’d almost think there’ s an even dialogue going on between the Big 4 labels and everyone else — that they’ve been involved in open and honest discussions with companies which still want to use their ‘product’.

That is, of course, utter nonsense. The corporate music industry has been using its immense financial and legal resources, and bought-and-paid-for politicians, to blackmail customers and shut down the competition, wherever possible regurgitating it in the corporate image.

There’s only one way for Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music.

Their way.

Former indie iMeem is on the edge of disaster, surviving only because, apparently, it’ s either struck, or is striking, a deal with Warner, the US company controlled by Canadian Edgar Bronfman jr.

Warner is trying to promote its own licensing scheme called Choruss while it and the other members of the Big 4 seriously impede studies as they try to blackmail students in universities across America into buying ‘product’. They using a scheme under which completely innocent people such as Brittany Kruger supposedly avoid persecution as file sharing criminals by agreeing to ’settle’ for extortionate amounts.

Now, companies such as Imeem, “signed complex deals with the labels that required them to pay large upfront fees and then small royalties — typically a penny or less — each time a song was played online. Advertising recouped only a fraction of that considerable expense. As a result, the online music landscape is littered with the wreckage of failed or troubled music start-ups.”

Of course, if the labels had been offering ‘product’ at reasonable instead of rip-off wholesale prices, and treating their customers properly instead of calling them criminals and thieves, everyone — the Big 4 included — would by now have been enjoying the fruits of online digital music distribution.

But this has never been about money. It’s about control and domination. Nothing else.

The NYT article gives the impression the music labels will now give digital music entrepreneurs, “room to experiment and perhaps succeed”.

It lists RealNetworks, Pandora and Napster Mk II as examples of companies enjoying the new “flexibility”.

“Spotify plans to enter the American market later this year, and its founder, Daniel Ek, says that the music labels have given the start-up flexibility because they are attracted to a service that, with its unlimited free music, could convert illegal downloaders into monetizable consumers of music,” says the story, quoting him as stating:

“This is what has been lacking for 10 years. The only way to beat piracy is by actually creating a legal service that is just as good.”

But, Spotify won’t discuss the details, “of its arrangements with the European divisions of the music companies, and many music entrepreneurs and observers question whether Spotify — and other digital music start-ups, for that matter — can build enduring businesses,” it adds.

Meanwhile, in spite of the absolutely enormous and continuing publicity given to the Big 4 on and offline, day in and day out, by the ever-faithful, ever-compliant, mainstream print and electronic media, there’s no currently viable online corporate music business.

All of the action is where it’ s always been: on the free p2pnetworks, Usenet, the tightly held darknets, WASTE, trusted friend-to-friend bulletin boards, FreeWAN cells, Freenet-type sites, physical and WiFi sneaker nets of various kinds, hidden sites, and so on.

The Big 4 are trying, Canute-like, to hold back the tide by trying to create the entirely false impression they’ re willing to negotiate openly and honestly.

But it’ s too late.

Far too late.

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New York Times – Music Labels Cut Friendlier Deals With Start-Ups, May 27, 2009
edge of disaster – Will Big Music save imeem?, May 7, 2009
Choruss – Warner Music’s Choruss, revisited, May 18, 2009
Brittany Kruger – RIAA to Brittany Kruger: Pay now. Or else. April 2, 2009
where it’ s always been – DarkNets: not tomorrow, but here and now, April 2, 2009