It would appear that Doug Morris is the Mr Magoo of the music industry.

Go and read this article then pop back.

What a dick, huh? This is the problem with industry figures who have a bottom line to protect, it’s all very here and now. No view of a longer term strategy.

If Kodak had taken the attitude that Mr Morris is taking you would have forgotten who they were by now. Instead Kodak embraced the digital revolution, they wholeheartedly threw themselves into digital camera technology. As a consequence a company that built an empire on the production of 35mm film is still in existence at a time when nobody uses 35mm film anymore.

The MP3 revolution, the digital watershed, was ignored by the music industry in some vague hope that it would die a death. After all they had CDs, weren’t they digital enough for people?

I’ve had an MP3 player since 1999 it had 64 MB of flash memory, which is about one album, and had to be loaded using a parallel cable. Don’t forget that this is at a time when it took four times longer to convert an album to MP3 than it did to tape it and downloading an album using a 56kbit modem operating at its theoretical maximum would have taken about two hours.

If I was prepared to go through that rigmarole surely others were doing so too? It is at this point, back in 1999, that the people in charge of the music business should have sat down, had a good hard look at what was happening and thought about what the future held. But they didn’t.

Then Napster became popular and started appearing on their radar and it really pissed them off.

But still they did nothing. Well, I say nothing, they tried to have Shawn Fanning killed and Metallica threw an almighty hissy fit but aside from that they did fuck all and just sat on their hands. Confident that they’d quelled the rebellion by threatening a load of teenagers with prison.

Next up in October 2001 was the iPod. You’d think by this point somebody would be trying to get something done. Nope.

Clearly something changed in the two years that followed as in April 2003 Apple introduced the iTunes Store which for 99¢ allowed you to download music from several major labels, in fact EMI, Universal, Warner Brothers, Sony Music Entertainment and BMG all had deals with Apple! So what happened then?

Panic is what happened, it was so late for them to do anything because as you’ll recall they had spent the past four years sitting on their hands, so they had no choice they could either lose out or go with Apple. So go with Apple they did.

Steve Jobs, Apple’s reinstated CEO and saviour, wanted to sell songs for 79¢ the record industry didn’t so the price was set at 99¢. Even at this stage they were still greedy. The result of Steve Jobs confidence and mini-monopoly on digital music sales is that the labels have spent every day since trying to get out of the contract and launch their own stores.

The music industry had better watch out though, their versions of the iTunes Store are label specific, come tied up with all sorts of DRM and don’t offer people a one-stop-shop. The public are tired of their bullying and claims of declining sales, no one believes it any more. They’ve had it too good for too long and every move they make is seen as too little, too late.

The internet is now offering individuals the freedom to be their own publisher. It doesn’t take a genius to work out what the next step is going to be.

Filed under: Ranting