I saw Steve Knopper interviewing Daniel Spotify at the Great Escape in Brighton, and so I bought his book on my way out. I finally finished it today, having interrupted it midway to real Clay Shirky's book, blogged below. As I said in that post, anything music/techy/social networky is grabbing my attention at the moment, and Steve's book obviously ticks the first two of those boxes.
As you can probably tell from the title, Steve builds his book with an opinion that greed is at the heart of the decline of the Record Industry. Though he offers little in the way of personal comment until the very end of his piece, the narration from industry insiders, the bent of his writing, and, most importantly, the facts, most definitely point to the major label's greed, stubborness and unwillingness to adapt as the reasons for the recording industry's current collapse. I think that's been pretty obvious to all for as long as I can remember. Majors have always been slow, but it's never really hurt them before. This time, it looks like it will.
Right now, all major labels seem to have left to offer this business is the catalogue they've built up - and so desperate are they to retain the profits they've known of old, they're stifling the future of the recorded industry by using that catalogue as leverage to spoil deals and try and halt progress. Without that leverage then existing artists, all future artists and the recording industry as a whole would be better off. Music and people who like music would all be better off.
Their alternative is to stop making more enemies, face the inevitable, go through the pain of it hitting them hard, and then work in the new world. The inevitable is that all downloadable music will be free to the consumer. I'd wager that. Stopping free music is like trying to stop water flowing through a dam with just your finger. It's easy to move music about now, and it will only get easier and easier as broadband speeds increase, internet access increases and storage capacities shrink. So face up to it. It's going to happen. People want to share music, they always have shared music, only now it's easier to share it for free than it is to buy it. That wasn't the case before. It is now.
If people are getting it for free, or as 'feels free' then there's room for there to be the necessary income to pay artists and music writers. That might be a licence (like a TV licence, everyone would have to have a music licence), through a tax via computer purchases or via ISPs. It's just that that tax or licence needs to be reasonable. It can't equate to £9.99 an album, or even 79p per track - all prices fixed to try and retain old profit margins. It needs to be close to free - or feel free - much like the £142 per year TV licence now - think how much 'free' content you get for that - all the channels, iplayer, downloadable content, radio content, web content etc etc - HUGE amounts of content - probably far more than all the back catalogue of music you could wish for).
I would urge the majors to embrace this and shake up. Suffer the closures and the job losses and the huge downsizing but come out fighting. I would very much like there to be major labels in the future. The kinds of labels who can invest money into new acts, take a chance on pop music, push an act harder so I can find them easier, give me bands who I can love for a short time (Keane, The Killers, Snow Patrol, Coldplay) before I begin to tire of them, and give me the acts who really know how to write songs that sound good on the dancefloor. They need to recognise that this is what they're good for. If they do, they have a future. Their catalogue is worth something now, but it'll be worth nothing once everyone chooses to trade music illegally because of their stubborness to move with the rest of the world. Their bands will have the right to break contract if the label's can't protect their work, and they will have nothing upon which to build a future.
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