p2pnet.net News:- Universal Music International’s Jorgen Larsen says he was floored when a lawyer recently told him it was “no wonder” his (Larsen’s) industry was in decline: “consumers know they are being ripped off, having to pay £15 for a CD that costs you 20p to manufacture”.

The quote comes from Larsen’s Financial Times story here, and goes on:

“I was alert enough to counter with the cinema argument (’It costs 1p to print a cinema ticket, and people do not complain about paying £8 to get in’), but the lawyer had already walked away.”

Good for the lawyer.

Larsen says in the physical world (that’s to say before the Net and p2p and while the entertainment industry was still able to maintain iron control over what ‘consumers’ saw, heard and bought) “our job was do-able”.

Nowadays, he says, things are much harder, “since some markets have declined by as much as half, due to [you guessed it] peer-to-peer ’sharing’ (or, as we see it, stealing) of copyrighted material”.

There is, though, a silver lining – “once legitimate delivery systems can make all the music in the world available to internet-connected consumers”, Larsen states.

And that, he says, is how it should be “because the music industry makes music, and the rest is distribution. Criticism that we slept through the internet revolution is misplaced, because we are not in the IT, technology, cable or phone businesses. Our only core business is to build the strongest possible artist rosters and make incredibly good recordings that people want to buy and own in whichever form suits them the best.”

Larson drones on about how the Net represents the greatest growth opportunity he’s ever experienced, about how music is becoming more portable and accessible, of “music’s liberation from a physical sound-carrier,” how the Net’s “capacity to offer infinitely more recordings than any physical retail location is another great promise”. And so on and so on.

He comes up with fascinating market-babble phrases such as, “an inversion of the ratio in physical sound-carrier sales” that may “reflect the current demographics of online consumers: affluent, time-poor 25- to 40-year-olds”. There’s much talk of music as a commodity and there’s a lot on the music “industry” (read Janis Ian on the subject).

But he deson’t say a word about Big Music’s unpayable debt to the people who keep the multi-billion-dollar “industry’ fat and happy (in spite of its claims to the contrary).

Don Henley says he thinks artists are at the bottom of the food chain. But he’s wrong.

You are.

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