Longtime U2 manager, Paul McGuinness created quite a stir yesterday with his speech at the MIDEM conference. In short, he is blaming technology manufacturers and ISPs for stealing music industry money. He called on them to start taking responsiblity for the content they have profited from for years, and start sharing their revenues with the content makers and owners.
He also asked Internet Service Providers to immediately introduce disconnection policies to end illegal music downloads and urged governments to make sure they do.
Some very entertaining analysis can be found at Techdirt:
These companies, McGuinness claims, need to help out “not on the basis of reluctantly sharing advertising revenue, but collecting revenue for the use and sale of our content.”
Techdirt: Uh huh. And I guess that automobile companies should be collecting revenue for the oil companies. And, home builders should be collecting revenue for the electricity companies. And, airlines should be collecting revenue for the hotel industry. You see, these are all separate industries. They may be complementary, but it’s up to each one individually to figure out the business models that work. None should be pressured into saving the other from its own missteps.
I take issue with a great deal of the McGuinness speech, but I keep coming back to this statement:
And embedded deep down in the brilliance of those entrepreneurial, hippy values seems to be a disregard for the true value of music.
This seems to be a topic of great debate lately - the “true value of music”. As for myself, I don’t think the problem is that people don’t believe music holds no value. The problem is that people believe digital files have no value - or very little anyway. In our highly-matrixed world of shoddy hardware and unstable operating systems - vulnerabilities and viruses littering the digital ecosystem, the perception is that a digital file is so easily corrupted, deleted, lost, etc. and is simply not permanent. Why should someone pay a premium price ($0.99) for something that THEY perceive as impermanent and holds very little value (i.e. a digital file containing 3-4 minutes of data)?
Moving on, always colorful but a bit long-winded, Bob Lefsetz chimes-in with some of my favorite analysis:
Paul McGuinness just pulled a Metallica here. Another uninformed rich music industryite with no idea how the Internet and technology truly work is only going to end up a sideshow, with egg on his face. Metallica has spent almost a decade trying to come back from the brink. Will it take McGuinness that long? It will take the music business at least that long if they listen to him.
And lastly, an interesting tidbit of information was revealed by McGuinness: Universal Music gets $1.00 for every Zune MP3 player sold. We previously knew Universal was getting something back from Microsoft, but the amount has always remained undisclosed.
McGuinness Speech In Full — Billboard.biz
U2 Manager Says Google And Its Hippie Friends Should Pay The Recording Industry — Techdirt
Pint of McGuinness Stirs Heavy Industry Reaction — Digital Music News
U2 Manager Takes Internet Providers To Task — Yahoo! News
As reported by Hypebot and in what is a very cool move in my opinion, Microsoft Zune recently sent substantial one time bonus checks to some digital distributors and independent labels. The checks appear to be the company’s answer to criticism of payments as high as $1 per player extracted by Universal Music Group and other major labels granting permission for Zune’s music sharing functionality.
