Rant about the music Industry

I was bored at a workshop, and thought it would be a good time to write my blog. I think I took the rant cliche a little too far. With the amount of wireless connections at conferences now and the content of said conferences being of questionable entertainment value, there might be a few more of these this summer. Maybe one day I'll extend that into a coherent argument rather than a rant.


Returning from a recent event where one of the major focuses was that of DRM in the music industry.

One of the buzz words that the industry have taken up is “fair use” and its implementations. They request that internet users give them a break a little bit and use content in a way which will not detrimental to the industry.

Obviously outside my official capacity, the following occurred to me; Why the fuck should we? This is the industry who have repeatedly shafted just about every player in their supply chain.

The Artist
The artist, based on whichever cliché, doesn't’t get a very good break on the supply chain. Fine we know they take drugs and shag groupies for a good while when they’re at the top of their career, but if the actual figures are calculated, you have about as much return from the interest on a savings bank account. The industry have set up a situation where they take none of the risk and reap almost all of the rewards. This is fine, it’s a corporate world. The “fair” agreement is that this is the filter to ensure that the record companies provide fodder for the public to embrace or reject.

The consumer
We will assume that the consumer who has so callously fucked over the nice family business record industry is from about 15 – 30. Now anyone from the age of about 20-30 grew up in the nineties. The record company were pushing wonderful content at us such as 2Unlimited, and other dire pop, they were paying similar dross to be in the charts so that gullible teenagers would feel that they needed to buy the stuff. We had the ticketmaster feud as led by Pearl Jam(Fat lot of good that did), we still have a monopoly charging concert goers an administration charge. If you grew up in these years, is it really any surprise, that there was no moral highground that you felt you should take or guilt which forced you into a nervous breakdown when file sharing came along.

The solution
The record industry, the mobile phone industry, the consumer electronics industry and the film industry have all stood up and proclaimed that there are holes in the iTunes/apple/iPod. Of course there are holes. But until something better comes along it the best solution out there. What's the difference, the difference is that Apples core clients respect them. And this bleeds through. On one hand you have the big corporate bully(they made that stereotype, and now back pedal), who are saying, “please…. Be nice to us, its unfair”, on the other hand you have a company who make demonstrably good hardware, usable software which is a joy to work with providing a damn good service. This is what the DRM solution is This is what the music industry must realize, not moan.