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July 13, 2009

Chris Anderson: 'There's nothing really wrong with the music industry'...

The Times (UK) | Read Full Story >

The Times:

Take the music industry. You come closer to spelling out where it’s going to go.

A: Music’s already there. We don’t have to guess about what the future of music is; we can already see it. It’s interesting as an analogy. We wrongly correlated, or equated, the music industry with the record labels. It now turns out in fact that the labels are now the least important part. If you look at the rest of the industry now, from the bands to the fans from Apple to tour promoters, everyone’s doing OK, except for the labels. So there’s really nothing wrong with the music industry; we’re just redefining what it is. And I wonder whether we’re going to see a similar fragmentation and reformation of media. Right now, media is defined as those who own the presses – the presses meaning either the physical presses or broadcast towers or whatever. We’re beginning to see a new class of professional media which operate on internet economics. They’re still small, and they don’t make anything like the money.


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#1 Stabitha says:

Apple gets paid -- mere cents per track, but paid nonetheless. Tour managers and bands get paid (not all shows can be free, after all). Record labels are still trying to figure out how to get paid in the face of fans getting what they want by getting their music for free. Yet it's some kind of revelation that the labels are not doing so well? There's nothing wrong with the music industry except for the notion that people deserve to consume the work of others for free. And the notion that labels are unneccesary is laughable and naive. Some bands don't, that's a given. But I've had bands crash at my apartment on tour lamenting how they have no idea how to set up their records in the market--and they've been at it for more than 10 years.

Now that free is the hot buzzword of the new economy, are we going to better define how bands, tour managers, and yes, even record label scum pay their rent? This intellectual exercise of information wanting to be free etc etc isn't doing a very good job of defining how things don't come to a grinding halt in the face of things that cost money, like rent, and gas.

Regarding the "new class of professional media which operate on internet economics," how quickly we forget the dot-com bubble. The danger comes when you assign monetary value to something entirely non-monetary -- case in point, Twitter. At least Facebook has some kind of business plan in selling all manner of micro-ads. There are many different kinds of value than financial value, but at the end of the day, you don't pay your server hosting costs with warm fuzzy feelings.


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