Eric Garland On The Movie (Music) Business
This is so right on, so exhaustive and prescient, that I must send it to you and you must read it.
Ostensibly about the movie business, i.e. its challenging future, Garland states that past is prologue and we look to what happened in the music business to know how things play out in the film business.
The key passage is this:
"They will have to chase legal remedies, legislative agendas, all the way to what they view as being the end of the line before they say ‘OK, so this really is the landscape we’re stuck with. As much as we didn’t want it, this appears to be it. Now we have to just dive in and make businesses that work here.’
And that’s where music has only just arrived in this country and note it hasn’t even come close to arriving in a lot of European countries. If you ask Universal Music Group in the U.K. ‘Are you going to win this war on piracy?’ They will say ‘Oh yes, swiftly and decisively and soon. The rate of peer-to-peer infringement will be down 70 percent in the U.K. in the next few months. They have specific targets. Not here. We’ve exhausted all of those paths. There’s a big gap. If the music industry in this country just now sort of arrived at the conclusion where they say ‘We just have to play on this field even through it ain’t home court and there isn’t a lot of advantage.’ And in some territories, music hasn’t even gotten there yet, then how can Hollywood be there?"
The above comes from the answer to the final question of the interview, you can scroll down to there for full context, but you should really take the time to read from beginning to end.
In other words, who you gonna trust, the media titans or a guy who makes his living on the computer, detailing how people actually use the Internet?
Mr. Garland is not histrionic. He has no agenda, other than making BigChampagne profitable, selling data. Please don’t shoot the messenger, pay attention to him!
