“we inadvertently went to war” my ass. I guess by “inadvertently” they mean deliberately suing their consumers.

If the Tech world loses this campaign, they will simply have to pay a bit more for their loss leader item. Since they tend to bundle music with other products this expense will not be felt in any significant way by the consumer. It will just shave the tech industry’s gross a tiny bit to about $87 billion.

But if art loses this war, that is to say, if record companies/artists lose their ability to control who gets to license their work and at what price, the music business, as we know it, ends. Music itself will suffer as an art form and the Tech-Masters will absorb the labels, bundle their catalogs, and in a few years you’ll buy a lap-top and it will come pre-loaded with an entire Juke Box of Classic Rock, Rap, Jazz, whatever.

This all sounds great if you’re a consumer, but if you’re a music company you will make only a small licensing fee and your artists and songwriters will see a paltry fraction of this sum. The trickle down effect for studio owners, producers, lawyers, managers, etc, will naturally be devastation.

As a music professional, if you’re not pissed off, you’re not paying attention.

This is my take on the story:
http://www.radi...it.co.uk/?p=110

I hope people haven’t been following your buy rating for WMG ‘for the last few months’. The stock price has been dropping significantly over that timespan.
Hardly making you look like a good stock watcher.

Exactly my thoughts. I did masters degree almost 10 years ago and people were using Napster and starting to use portable mp3 players. If I was a share holder in any of these companies, I’d be selling quick.

It’s simply unbelievable how these companies don’t get it. They sit on their content and expect the money to just roll in. And when it starts rolling (trickling) in again via iTunes, they start crying that they don’t have any control. You don’t *deserve* any control. You have failed to innovate. You have failed to effectively leverage your assets. You are business failures. Your corporate structures and systems are not built for the digital age. No customer gives a shit about the label. They only care about the artist. And this lines up nicely with the fact that labels don’t give a shit about the artists.

Once upon a time, I was working on a digital music venture. For any given artist you would have to tell the label you wanted to distribute their content, then they would have to pay a lawyer to go check the contract… Didn’t these people have anyone capable of throwing together a simple excel file at the very least? It’s not *that* complicated. And then you want marketing money for me to sell your digital content. What’s that about? So I can hold inventory? Out with the old, in with the new.

penny per track per stream? what imeem and lalal is paying? that does not enable the market. one has to generate a $10 cpm for every song listened to for break even. not possible!!!!!!!!!!!!

the rates need to be closer to a $1cpm (1/10th of $.01) for a model to work. until then, they will keep playing bop the mole with perceived infringers.

this is marketing speak. the one place warner is successful because there is still control is the mobile handset. they are milking it for all it’s worth before the consumers win out and carriers lose control to open handsets.

when that happens, warner will be scratching their heads wondering what to do now that the cow they’ve been milking is gone. and they will have not prepared ahead of time for such an event.