They ALL said the EXACT SAME text: “the internet is the future but only after 10 years”

I started to think this could be actually be some kind of masterplan or something, due to the sameness of the statements.

Needless to say, I switched focus to importing MP3 players (thereby indirectly adding to the online piracy thing), started to make money, and sent them the finger.

The economic reality is that the Internet companies have not come up with a model that makes money yet.

Ex “Thanks for helping us get all these spins for the new artist, let me know and I’ll give you anything you want.” Hmmm — what about a trip for two winners (and the PD and the GM w/wives etc) to go see this artist play live in Barcelona next month? Sure — here are tickets, hotel, spending money etc. Enjoy!”

The the radio station then turns around and sells the promotion to an advertiser. Great business and everybody is happy as long as the FCC doesn’t snoop around too much.

Labels will not die — but they will be making a whole lot less very shortly. Keep in mind that the costs of launching a new album (production/marketing etc) has dropped significantly, so the labels are loosing a lot of their power.

Pretty interesting to know that labels like UMG takes 50% of artists non-music related income. Whether that’s a shoe deal or a fragrance, the label gets 50%. Got to make up for all the lost sales from Pirate Bay etc…

Maybe the start-ups should band together and form their own lobby. They could then negotiate from a position of strength. At present Apply is the only gorilla that can do that.

That is a ridiculous argument. For indie labels is somewhat credible (although not much), but for the majors the reverse is the case. The labels have spent big money promoting the music to make it popular. A streaming site is taking advantage of the major labels promotion to get customers. No streaming site would be successful with a bunch of bands no one has ever heard of. You need the big ticket acts to draw in the customers, and the big tickets acts are big ticket acts because the major labels have spent a lot of money promoting them. The whole “free music” argument doesn’t make sense anyway since the labels usually only make money off the sales of the recordings. The argument that they can make it up on the back-end with ancillary revenue sources is moronic. Those sources are usually the domain of the artist (unless they’ve signed a goofy contract). Asking the labels to roll over and die so that some tech startup can make a zillion dollars shows a complete lack of understanding of the music business. Also, expecting labels to cede profit to support some nascent startup is silly since the failure rate of startups is so high. If the labels pulled a Hulu, that would make more sense…