What a clusterfuck THAT was.<\/p>\n
The managers in the U.K. are pissed.\u00c2\u00a0 And they’re not going to take it anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re rebelling against major label practices.\u00c2\u00a0 They want no packaging deduction on digital downloads, they want MORE of the digital pie, they want to be paid royalties on PHYSICAL product.<\/p>\n
This has been the talk of In The City.\u00c2\u00a0 That the Music Managers Forum (MMF) were gonna hold a pow-wow.\u00c2\u00a0 And it was standing room only, but the lead-up was better than the execution.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, the managers aired their grievances, most of them legit, but they just didn’t have a plan of attack, they seemed to be WHINING!\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, they plan to intervene in this copyright hearing, then again I heard from the BPI guy that it’s costing THEM over a million pounds for a brief, he wants to see the managers cough up that kind of dough for a barrister.\u00c2\u00a0 What I was told was this was about copyright royalties on digital downloads.\u00c2\u00a0 Presently it’s a bit over eight percent, the publishers want twelve.\u00c2\u00a0 Needless to say, the labels don’t want to pay.\u00c2\u00a0 They’ve been arguing for three years.\u00c2\u00a0 Ergo the hearing.\u00c2\u00a0 But other than that?\u00c2\u00a0 I couldn’t discern the plan.\u00c2\u00a0 God, couldn’t they at least come up with an artists’ bill of rights?\u00c2\u00a0 Or maybe they should just go on strike, that’s probably the only way any progress can be made.\u00c2\u00a0 But you know some manager would break rank.\u00c2\u00a0 And they don’t want to give up sucking at the tit for a minute.<\/p>\n
But then there was Jeff Fenster, defending the major label position.\u00c2\u00a0 Hey JEFF!\u00c2\u00a0 You don’t OWN Jive!\u00c2\u00a0 Have some PERSPECTIVE!\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what always blows my mind about the label employees, they defend the heinous corporation like it’s family and don’t come to their senses until they get blown out.\u00c2\u00a0 Is that what’s wrong with corporations or people…\u00c2\u00a0 I’m thinking about that one.<\/p>\n
Then again, if things are so bad, why don’t they just do it by themselves.\u00c2\u00a0 If, as Jazz Summers kept saying, it’s a new paradigm, why don’t they release the records THEMSELVES?<\/p>\n
Actually, the manager of Radiohead was on the dais, he was part of the assembled multitude.\u00c2\u00a0 Supposedly they’re out of their deal, why don’t they put out their record on their own label?\u00c2\u00a0 God, I heard Simply Red did this just about a year ago and sold FOUR MILLION ALBUMS!!\u00c2\u00a0 Isn’t that like selling TWELVE TO SIXTEEN MILLION through the major label system?<\/p>\n
God, it’s so different here.\u00c2\u00a0 The managers aren’t scruffy fighters you’d be afraid to come across in a dark alley.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re all well-meaning and articulate.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like a completely different BUSINESS!<\/p>\n
And speaking of completely different businesses, the panel before, actually a keynote address, by this guy Martin Higginson, was REVELATORY!<\/p>\n
Martin runs this mobile content aggregator MOM.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve heard too much mobile b.s. so I wasn’t eager to go, but since it was a KEYNOTE!\u00c2\u00a0 And Martin started off with all the usual statistics, about mobile penetration, but then he took a left turn.\u00c2\u00a0 First, he said the labels were delusional, pricing mobile downloads at three to four pounds, the price of a ringtone.\u00c2\u00a0 Ringtones were NOVELTIES!\u00c2\u00a0 That someone bought a limited quantity of, maybe three or four a year at most.\u00c2\u00a0 Music depended on VOLUME!\u00c2\u00a0 The tracks couldn’t be more than 50p (eighty cents, presently iTunes sells tracks in the U.K. for 79p), otherwise people would STEAL THEM!<\/p>\n
And THAT’S where it got interesting.<\/p>\n
What bugs the shit out of me is everybody in the U.S. saying we live in the greatest country in the world.\u00c2\u00a0 If the U.S. is so great why is it costing me more than thirty dollars a DAY to access the Net in the U.K.\u00c2\u00a0 Our fiscal policy SUCKS!\u00c2\u00a0 As does our cell phone network.<\/p>\n
Here mobiles are a religion.\u00c2\u00a0 Turns out, you can sideload content onto your mobile and then BLUETOOTH it to everybody in the vicinity.\u00c2\u00a0 This guy Martin, he had it right.\u00c2\u00a0 The execs think people want to hang out in record stores.\u00c2\u00a0 Really, they want to hang out on the CORNER, showing each other their mobiles.\u00c2\u00a0 And, unless music was priced cheaply enough, the kids were just going to steal it.<\/p>\n
Oh, he had this Sony Walkman phone.\u00c2\u00a0 Orange and white.\u00c2\u00a0 He says it holds hundreds of songs.\u00c2\u00a0 That the big retailer here says he’s going to sell more of these this Christmas than iPods.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, you can download music on these phones, but you’ve got to pay for 3G access, which almost nobody has, they don’t want to pay for it.\u00c2\u00a0 So, you just plug in your USB cable, take what you want from your computer and give it to EVERYBODY YOU KNOW VIA BLUETOOTH!\u00c2\u00a0 This exists RIGHT NOW!<\/p>\n
God, he played actual phone calls to retailers.\u00c2\u00a0 Asking about buying digital downloads on mobiles.\u00c2\u00a0 EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEM SAID TO JUST STEAL THE MUSIC ON YOUR COMPUTER AND SIDELOAD IT!\u00c2\u00a0 The execs think mobiles are their savior, but it’s a whole ‘nother quagmire.\u00c2\u00a0 Martin’s advocating cheap prices a la iTunes so people won’t trade illegally.\u00c2\u00a0 Yeah, right.\u00c2\u00a0 Like the labels can survive on iTunes revenue.<\/p>\n
Oh, this guy in a suit went on about the dilemmas facing the labels.\u00c2\u00a0 How indies can get paid without them.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe the managers should have listened to THIS guy!<\/p>\n
And before that I went to the soundtrack panel.\u00c2\u00a0 Geoff Bywater had some interesting things to say.\u00c2\u00a0 Turns out Fox doesn’t even worry if no label wants to get involved, they just sell the tracks from their movies and TV shows direct on iTunes.\u00c2\u00a0 God, the labels are CLUELESS!\u00c2\u00a0 Trying to maximize revenue today, marginalizing themselves tomorrow.<\/p>\n
Next is the indie label forum.\u00c2\u00a0 Alan McGee, Tony Wilson, Richard Russell and Chris Blackwell.<\/p>\n
They don’t do this kind of shit in the U.S.<\/p>\n
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What a clusterfuck THAT was. The managers in the U.K. are pissed.\u00c2\u00a0 And they’re not going to take it anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re rebelling against major label practices.\u00c2\u00a0 They want no packaging deduction on digital downloads, they want MORE of the digital pie, they want to be paid royalties on PHYSICAL product. This has been the talk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-2S","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}