Led Zeppelin clips may be hard to wipe off YouTube
As doug so succinctly puts it: “they are foolish, avaricious, clueless idiots and they deserve everything they get”
Radiohead let fans pick their own price for the latest album.
For all these “end of the music industry” type commentators (like Bob Lefsetz: This is the industry’s worst nightmare. Superstar band, THE superstar band, forging ahead by its own wits. Proving that others can too. And they will.)… I have one question… Who exactly made them THE superstar band? And who promoted the first 6 albums?
Many acts have made the self same switch already - unsigned, self released, promoted entirely on the web. Cliff Richard. Simply Red. Marillion. Those in the know say Robbie is only an album or so away as well. This is simply getting out at the top of the market. Milking a huge and increasingly static fanbase is not really revolutionary behaviour. Just because we (the blogosphere) are part of that huge and static fanbase does not mean that Radiohead are different, it just means we are getting old. Sorry about that.
(Links from this BoingBoing article)
Rich has pointed me at Tom Loosemore’s blog, following my previous “TV networks are dead” post. Tom asks:
I have been saying this to anyone who’ll listen to my drunken ranting at web networking events for 2 years now. I have believed it so much that every time I hear about another success of Sky By Broadband, 4od, BBC iPlayer or any other DRM crippled attempt to secure a dead position I snort derisively and start muttering under my breath.
TV networks are dead. The business models they maintain are dead. And the technology they are peddling now is to TV exactly what the Sony rootkit was to CDs. Dead. And likely to cause embarrassment.
The author and the Austen plot that exposed publishers’ pride and prejudice
Now, don’t get me wrong. I can understand entirely how this would have happened (if, for example, I was skimming this week’s submissions and saw someone sending me Austen, could I be arsed writing a specific rejection? Probably not). But…
It does, however, make me think of a current colleague of ours, who has written 4 novels, none of which have been accepted. Instead of getting a straight rejection, though, she has been asked to send more work (hence the 4 novels and still working with us, rather than 1 novel and an easy life in the South of France). Seems to me that as the publishing industry undergoes it’s own crisis akin to music and films getting that publishing deal is just going to get harder and harder.
No longer is the powerful debut novel enough; instead they want to see if you’ve got a series in you that they can milk for the next few years. The literary equivalent of Die Hard 4.0 or the 20th, 25th, 30th, 35th anniversary edition of Dark Side of the Moon. Oh joy.
Apparently there actually is a reason why things are named the way they are at IKEA.
Fake Steve Jobs (who, strangely, I was only turned on to by this post slating him over Technology Evangelist) has a fantastic write up about the “Universal doesn’t renew iTunes contract” story. What the man says is true.
The music industry nobs have finally worked out what we’re doing
Rather obvious when you think about it… Apple embeds your account information in its un-DRMed downloads.
The latest round of HD-DVDs have been cracked, only a week after the update. That, in itself, is not surprising. What is surprising is the way it came out. Fascinating.
Lot’s of EMI news over the last couple of days… Apple finally launches iTunes plus, the (currently EMI only) DRM free 256kbps store and they’ve finally done a deal with YouTube (remembering they were the only major to not have done a YouTube deal before the Google purchase).
It looks like their dramatic shift in policy is starting to bear fruit.
The sale discussions with Terra Firma possibly provide some insight into what’s been going on…
It’s a given that post-sale the ludicrously profitable EMI Music Publishing will be separated from the failing EMI Recorded Music but this opening up of the catalogue sends some interesting signals…
The risk of breaking new artists is likely too great for a private equity team; instead it’s more likely that the new management team will ditch artist development and look to milk the enormous back catalogue (and the list is truly awesome, from The Beatles, The Stones, and Pink Floyd right through to Radiohead, Kylie, Robbie Williams and Coldplay).
By taking a short sharp boost in sales from the DRM free deals they’ve done, by dropping or icing the bulk of the current crop and by canning new artist development it’s likely that whoever buys EMI Group now will turn Recorded Music into an attractive proposition for Warners (who, as I’ve wittered about before, have been trying to get hold of that catalogue for years and are sniffing around again) and will be left with a very profitable publishing business at the end of it all.
Seems to me a very sad end for the conglomerate of labels responsible for 5 of the top 10 albums of all time (and 9 of the top 20) and some of the finest moments in rock and roll history.
I like to think that my fondness for the label is not wholly due to the 5 years I spent working there, but also because of their genuine influence on the progress of rock music. From creating a British Elvis in 1958 in the guise of Cliff Richard, through the influence of their genre labels like Harvest, their misunderstanding of Punk, riding the New Wave of Heavy Metal (Powerslave, anyone?), Baggy, Britpop, Neo-psychedelia and ending up with out and out pop they’ve been with us all the way.
If I’m right it will be a sad day, despite the obvious failings of the current music industry model. But like pandas and smallpox, sometimes the time has just come.
This work is licensed under a
Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.