EMI Holds New Talks for Rival<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0 But although Edgar Bronfman, Jr. is finally going to look good in the eyes of his family, the real story is the eroding power of the major labels.<\/p>\nThat’s why this merger is happening.\u00c2\u00a0 Warner and EMI can’t compete with Universal.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re both music-only companies.\u00c2\u00a0 One day the stock market is going to wake up to their sad state and their stock is going to tank, and never recover.\u00c2\u00a0 So, you try to achieve critical mass with this merger, and get numerous tax\/accounting benefits in the process.\u00c2\u00a0 Yup, you can massage the numbers to the point where the REAL status of the combined company, which won’t be good, won’t be known for years, after the mercenary men running the enterprise have pocketed more millions.<\/p>\n
Oh, we could speak of the divestment of publishing assets.\u00c2\u00a0 And regulatory review.\u00c2\u00a0 But those aren’t problems.\u00c2\u00a0 Publishing will survive in the new era.\u00c2\u00a0 Because there’s very little investment necessary.\u00c2\u00a0 And the companies’ critical mass is appealing to writers who find it cumbersome to administer their own rights, especially when publishers will now let them get their works back in a few years.\u00c2\u00a0 And the Mario Monti era is over.\u00c2\u00a0 This merger sails through.\u00c2\u00a0 And then in a world of ever-increasing distribution and exposure outlets we’re down to three, ever-shrinking, major labels.<\/p>\n
You’ve seen this play out before.\u00c2\u00a0 They don’t add employees.\u00c2\u00a0 They don’t sign MORE artists.\u00c2\u00a0 All they do is cut back.\u00c2\u00a0 When majors controlled radio, and that was the only game in town, it didn’t matter.\u00c2\u00a0 But now with only a small percentage of the acts extant on majors, and very few employees at the labels to work them, and so many places to get them started, it’s like defending a country with three huge tanks.\u00c2\u00a0 You need more men in the field.\u00c2\u00a0 You need infrastructure.\u00c2\u00a0 And all you’ve got is gutted enterprises.<\/p>\n
The movie is unspooling so slowly that many don’t see the big picture, they’re missing the plot.<\/p>\n
Turns out closing down Napster was the worst thing the majors could do.\u00c2\u00a0 They could have been paid for traded files for almost six years now.\u00c2\u00a0 Music acquisition would not have been driven further underground, where it can’t be tracked.\u00c2\u00a0 Scared of losing their distribution stranglehold, not only did the majors leave money on the table, they prevented new acts from being broken, for there was nowhere to HEAR them.<\/p>\n
So, like a guerilla army, individuals crept in.\u00c2\u00a0 Via the Net.\u00c2\u00a0 Via MySpace.\u00c2\u00a0 With the threshold for entry into the game so low, insurgents poured over the border.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, most of them suck.\u00c2\u00a0 But not everybody is a leader, not everybody is a winner.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s going to be death by a thousand paper cuts.\u00c2\u00a0 So many of these people would NEVER sign with a behemoth, and one day, a few of them are going to break big, and it’s end game for the monoliths.<\/p>\n
I’m not absolutely sure the majors’ cartel could have been saved.\u00c2\u00a0 But they could have given it a good shot.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead of dipping their toes in the water, they could have embraced the future, made new non-heinous deals, given smaller advances, tried to sign and distribute and pay all the small bands.\u00c2\u00a0 But, through sheer ignorance, through sheer hubris, they missed the future COMPLETELY!<\/p>\n
Further testimony to the loss of the majors’ power is the iTunes debacle.\u00c2\u00a0 They saber-rattled, in PUBLIC, that they needed variable pricing at the iTMS.\u00c2\u00a0 But they lost.\u00c2\u00a0 God, at what cost.\u00c2\u00a0 Their image took a hit and they didn’t even get more money.\u00c2\u00a0 Steve Jobs isn’t afraid of the record companies.\u00c2\u00a0 Like a better Bono, all he has to do is take his story to the public, and the public sides with HIM!\u00c2\u00a0 Which people did when he labeled the majors greedy.<\/p>\n
These guys are against the ropes.\u00c2\u00a0 And although their figurehead Mitch Bainwol gives the illusion they’re fighting, the wind is coming out of their sails, they’re going to slip through the ropes, they’re gonna disappear.<\/p>\n
And a new Bill Gates-type figure is going to step into the void.\u00c2\u00a0 Someone just as mercenary as they are, but who UNDERSTANDS the new marketplace.<\/p>\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The most important story transpiring in the music business this week is taking place in Canada.\u00c2\u00a0 Where first the indie labels and now the artists are in REVOLT!\u00c2\u00a0 Not against their customers, but CRIA, the north of the border equivalent of the RIAA. CRIA was cozying up to legislators, with a worldwide agenda that didn’t […]<\/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-411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s96vPs-emiwb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411","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=411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}