EMI Dropping Copy Limits

This is a bit off the beaten track here, but I note that the music industry is finally figuring out just how stupid it has been in recent years. EMI, which is based in London, announced a joint deal with Apple to sell its music on iTunes free of copy protection. The New York Times has the story here: EMI Dropping Copy Limits on Online Music

I note this event for a couple of reasons.

First: I always find it amusing when organizations like corporations get so firmly stuck in the past. The music industry, for all its “hip” spin and advertising is about as old fashioned as you can get. They sell millions of CD’s a year without any copy protection: 90% of their annual sales are still in the antiquated CD format. They do not seem at all perturbed by the notion that someone can buy a CD and copy it as many times as they wish. But they get decidedly skittish when it becomes possible to download music digitally: when the MP3 format started to boom, and after Apple launched iTunes, the music industry suddenly went copyright berserk and issued all sorts of ominous threats about the death of creativity etc if music were “free”. Codswallop. Innovation like iTunes is saving the music industry from its own self inflicted slow death.

And that’s my second point: the slow spiral down in worldwide popular music sales is not a function of evil teenagers copying endless songs from illicit music sharing sites. It is because the music sucks. The industry has not produced a string of musical artists worth a lick for decades. So of course its sales are awful. Get a better product and sales will grow. I think even they should understand that mantra. Slick marketing is not a substitute for product quality over the long run. All marketing can do is mask a short term decline.

Lastly: the internet changed the way music and other creative stuff gets distributed. Duh! It’s only been a few years, but it seems that even the dullards at the music publishers have finally realized that the internet needs to be used, not ignored. Some of us were on the internet bandwagon in the late 1980’s [I admit I completely screwed up that bit of foresight!], why has it taken two decades for the fat bureaucracies to start to catch up? Simple: their profits are rooted in old fashioned business models where the “middle man” is monarch. So much of a monarch that he/she forgot what they were supposed to do which is to make it possible for talented people to get their wares sold. It’s not just about packaging, it’s about talent spotting too.

So get over it. Let’s hope Bartelsmann, Sony BMG, and Warner et al follow EMI’s lead. Set the music free. Then go look for some real talent.