The future of radio is going to be very, very measured.

Emmy Advanced Media: Do You Really Want To Know?:

"The lingua franca of the television media business is Nielsen Ratings, but if the box is opened, that will immediately change. Good, bad, or indifferent, a common currency and common unit sizes make intelligent negotiations possible. How will the world of media look when every buy has a census-based, quantitative measurement attached to it?"

The above quote references television, obviously.

But clearly, radio will follow. Precise measurement is getting closer, not farther away. And it serves to figure that in less than a decade, Arbitron isn't going to be working off of a bunch of pitiful telesurveys.

There will be culture shock and rebellion when this first happens, and after that, radio (if it's even recognizable as a form of mass media) will recover.

The economic effects of piracy on the music industry

The Long Tail: "Just enough piracy"

A very interesting post on digital rights management (DRM):

The first is about the user experience: Any protection technology that is really difficult to crack is probably too cumbersome to be accepted by consumers...

...The second reason the quest for zero-piracy is a mistake is an economic one: piracy can actually let you raise your prices.

The discussion that follows gets much more interesting in the comments down. Spend some time at this link and I promise you'll understand both sides of the piracy/DRM problem.

The real piracy problem is overseas and always has been.

One in three music discs is illegal but fight back starts to show results

If no one owns the music, then where is the value?

The concept of copyright continues to be attacked, mainly by the owners of existing copyright(s) who created/purchased property under current copyright assumptions. They fear a future where their property will be stolen, so they want their ownership fortified.

Jeff Jarvis is arguing that these people are losing the battle, and will lose the war in the somewhat near future.

He says that the ultimate value of content ("pre-recorded music" for those of us cluttering up the music business) either reflects trust or represents trust outright. That somehow, there's something less and less tangible (or taxable) about a recorded performance. Or an image. Or any entertainment. That, what we all find value in, is a guarantee of entertainment.

The philosophical discussion at the above link makes a lot of sense"

Content is transient, its value perishable, its chance of success slight. You think your article or book or movie or song or show is worth a fortune and in a blockbuster economy, if you were insanely lucky, you could be right. But now anyone can create content. And thanks to the power of the link — and the trust it carries — anyone can get the world to see it. Is some of this new load of content crap? Sure. Lots of content in the old media world was crap, too. But don’t calculate the proportions. Look instead at the gross volume of quality: There’s simply more good stuff out there than there could be before. And it can be created at incredibly low or no cost.

There is no scarcity of good stuff. And when there is no scarcity, the value of owning a once-scarce commodity diminishes and then disappears. In fact, it’s worse than that: Owning the content factory only means that you have higher costs than the next guy: You own the high-priced talent or infrastructure while your new competitor owns just her own talent and a PC...

...But in this new age, you don’t want to own the content or the pipe that delivers it. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You don’t want to extract value. You want to add value. You don’t want to build walls or fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in.

And once you get your head around that, you will see that you can grow so much bigger so much faster with so much less cost and risk.

So don’t own the content. Help people make and find and remake and recommend and save the content they want. Don’t own the distribution. Gain the trust of the people to help them use whatever distribution and medium they like to find what they want.

I just don't understand how anyone could make money on this--charging for trust when the replication costs are so astoundingly low and trust being a bit, well, liquid in the beginning--and I'm sure that Jeff Jarvis' response would be, "Well, the people that figure that out will be the ones who make the most money."

Warner to launch unconvincing gimmick called "e-labels"

Billboard PostPlay: Warner To Launch "E-Label":

"Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music's chairman and CEO, said Monday that the new mechanism will be called an 'e-label,' in which artists will release music in clusters of three songs every few months rather than a CD every few years.
He was speaking at a conference...The e-label will permit recording artists to enjoy a 'supportive, lower-risk environment' without as much pressure for huge commercial hits, Bronfman said. In addition, artists signed to the e-label will retain copyright and ownership of their master recordings."

What exactly is the motivation for Warners on this?

Assuming the deal with the artist is typical, Warners will pay an advance, pay for recording costs, and have to gin up marketing costs every few months (advertising? publicity? tour support?) to support multiple yearly releases. Oh, and they don't retain ownership, which currently is something that the labels are iron-fisted about retaining. Add in to that the low margins for products like iTunes tracks.

Under these assumptions, there is simply no reason to think that Warners will give any sort of priority to an e-label. This announcement sounds like a stupid promotional ploy.

Mossberg (Wall Street Journal) on why renting music is the new 8-track

The Mossberg Report -- Personal Technology from The Wall Street Journal.:

"The biggest problem with renting is that if you stop paying your subscription, even for one month, all the songs you've ever downloaded--going back years--will become inert and unplayable. Rental song files are rigged with computer code that requires a monthly digital confirmation the renter is continuing to pay. Without that, the song files die.

An iTunes user could pay $500 to acquire 500 individual songs (buying whole albums is somewhat cheaper) over two years, and those songs are always hers and will always play. By contrast, a Yahoo user might download 500 rental songs over two years for just $120 in subscription fees, but the songs will become unplayable unless she pays hundreds or thousands more in subscription fees over many years, even if the fees rise."

The only way around this would be something like hymn, which decrypts iTunes music files.

Do not ever enable this woman.

Courtney Love is a liar, an addict, a waste of marginal talent, and an embarassing waste of resources.

Who the hell signed Love to an alleged one-off deal to Virgin a few years ago? Does that person have a job?

It would be nice if the grownups in the music industry would start treating their rosters like valuable investments instead of whimsical, disposable unit shifters. How many more drug-addled losers do we have to watch fall apart publicly, when all along there has been a record label backing their downward spiral? People like Courtney Love shouldn't be trusted with anyone's resources. People like Anton Newcombe shouldn't be backed with anyone's money. People like Pete Doherty shouldn't be allowed near anything of shareholder value. Whitney Houston shouldn't be supported in any way until she's proven clean. With the music industry's bottom line where it is, it's time to take a stand against the idiocy that is label-enabled addiction and abuse.

You can't lose music sales that you never had

Church of the Customer: More on the marketing world is flat:

"'For almost every musician, the number of sales they lose because people never hear of their album is far larger than the sales they'd lose because people can get it for free online,' Doctorow says. 'The biggest threat we face isn't piracy, it's obscurity."

Actually, I just switched out "writer" for "musician" and "book" for "album." But you get the picture.

Ah, so this explains why music sales are down

This guy comes up with a list of questions questions that inadvertently describes much of the downturn in music sales. It can be described in one word: information.

We all know that we live in the information age. Well, most of us know that. Most of us use email every single day, the web, and have a vast number of entertainment options closely related to technology.

This deluge of information gives music consumers much more than a major label could. Consumers have wrested control from the major labels. Major labels do not control information about their acts, and they've more or less given up trying--witness the abysmal major label-run websites. Major labels barely control retail pricing anymore--the big boxes sell below MSRP and the labels can't do anything about it. Major labels were built from the ground up to control marketing, and struggle to let things happen any other way. And it's not just the majors--many indies are stuck in the same pattern of confusion. Also, to be fair, forces outside the labels (the RIAA, etc.) form constraining industry boundaries.

Are niches more profitable than hits? YES.

The Long Tail begs the question, answers.

The graph from the Long Tail explains music retailing very well. And unless you're willfully ignorant, it provides a crystal clear window to the future: digital distribution is going to eat retail alive, and along the way virtual storefronts are going to kill off brick-and-mortar stores.

The death of mom-n-pop record stores was seen as another sign of The Man winning circa the mid-90s. Back then, the big box retailers like Wal-Mart, BestBuy, and Circuit City started selling compact discs at a loss, which killed off independent stores with alarming speed and greatly weakened the ones that have survived to this day.

Given the data at hand--the Long Tail analysis of the DVD market is directly comparable to what's happening in music retailing--it will be very interesting to see how many independent record stores will be able to survive the next 5-10 years. The outlook is grim at best, unless of course some decide to expand their offering into, say, coffee.

Indie record stores are essentially looking at a future where they exist for reasons of nostalgia. Kids (tweens/teens) are growing up without indie record stores and are nearing the point where most of their music purchases are done online. The primary customer of an indie store is going away--even those of us who grew up going to one find it much more convenient, efficient, and economical to order off of the web.

One would think this transition to digital would be good news, news that would be embraced completely by the major label system. But so far, due primarily to encompassing fears of piracy, labels have watched culture changed from the sidelines. Their label brands have disintegrated and rapidly are fading into the ether. Their organizational structures are unweilding, entrenched in business practices that are decades old, and many industry leaders are blissfully unaware of the technological options integrated into today's teenagers.

As I've noted many times in the past, the music industry is in the classic throes of a mature (and declining) market. Margins are weak, cumbersome conglomerations are ineffective, and innovation among the market leaders is non-existent. The biggies are simply not nimble enough to change with the times, and they're so entrenched that they can't muster the courage to fight for the future. And it all makes sense given the risk: nobody wants to go down with the ship. Meanwhile, people like Jason Flom are getting kicked from the ship, ready to watch the carnage from the sidelines.

The major label system tries to win with homeruns, and any other base hits are regarded as either lucky (bands that get ignored by the label but don't manage to kill off their fan base in the process) or inconvenient (acts that steal precious company resources when projected double-platinum only manage platinum.) Meanwhile, the indie system keeps coming and coming. True, labels like Matador couldn't do it without a significant form of physical distribution, but that's going to change in the coming decade. Smart kids are starting labels, and they're planning and building for the day when they don't have to pay RED or anyone else to assure that product is in the stores. And that's why niches are the future.

Bad news for the FreeFiona conspiracy theorists

Fiona Fashions A Different 'Machine':

"But in truth, Apple was not happy enough with the Brion-produced versions to release them. In April 2004, she sought out Elizondo, who played bass on two songs from her 1999 album 'When the Pawn...,' to help her re-imagine the material."

The indie press (and now, of course, the Internet) is always eager to seize upon the instances of major label jobbery on an artist. And there are many, many examples of major label stupidity when it comes to career management. But it looks like paranoia got the best of them on this one.

Meanwhile, why is an artist with a history of miserable live performances and unstable outbursts even supported by Epic? Her last album, the one with the high-school gimmick title, came out five years ago at the very end of the alterna-revolution. And as Billboard reports, there idea of live dates to promote this album and Apple's career sound like more of a hope than a plan. This is a classic example of an artist who should be whiling away on an indie instead of wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on a major. Cut her loose, Epic. You'll both be happier.

Payola

Eliot Spitzer, in his thinly disguised run for governor, has evidently won a few more admirers by getting Sony BMG to essentially pay a fine for bribing radio stations.

I really don't see what the fuss is all about. In the end, it seems that a lot of people, including an allegedly smart guy like Spitzer, have no idea how business operates.

In the radio business, paying for favortism is called payola. Sometimes it is in the form of paying a pre-arranged dollar figure for a number of spins, and sometimes it's just greasing the powers that be with free trips and other swag.

In the retail business, paying for favortism is called "business development." Sometimes it is in the form of paying for pre-arranged distribution arrangements--thousands of new products are developed every year for grocery stores, yet a fraction of 1% ever make it to market simply because shelf space cannot be purchased--and sometimes it's just greasing the powers that be with free trips and other swag.

Frankly, spending money to develop relationships happens in almost any market. The moral and ethical standard seems based on the acceptable transparency of the promotional spending than anything else. Payola--in some form or another--is always going to be with us. There are always going to be ways to influence a playlist at a radio station with money or other spiffs, and there's no way to prevent it. None. That people get so alarmed about actual money being passed between a label and a PD but accept other relationship-enhancing transactions to continue unabated seems a Victorian-era moral relativism. As the Financial Times' Thomas W. Hazlett notes, "competition will perhaps come to entail ever more innovative compensation schemes. Look out for record labels that have plenty of job openings available for friends and relatives of radio station insiders."

Meanwhile, the influence peddlers in Washington, DC continue to operate without restriction--the market restriction is geared towards our elected representatives and not the lobby groups. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on lobbying, and interest groups essentially write the majority of spending bills that come before Congress. This is exactly the process that occurs on a statewide level and indeed, in most municipalities. While it's sad that the music business continues to be plagued by outright pay-for-play, Spitzer should next turn his attention to the corruption at the statehouse and indeed, New York City with more influential results.

Rent-a-tune: it's not gaining traction in the market, yet some observers still yearn for it

Coolfer (and many others) keep chiding Apple for abandoning a successful strategy in favor of a losing one.

says Glenn Coolfer:

Why wouldn’t Apple want to introduce a music subscription service? Maybe it’s for the same reasons the music industry is slow to move away from its CD-dominated business model: Fear in the uncertainty, fear of giving up its bread and butter. For a change, says the article, Apple will let somebody else innovate and then play follow-the-leader.

Let's consider the facts, then consider Apple's strategy:

* Apple has achieved market dominance with their current service
* No subscription service has had anything close to the traction of an own-by-song model
* the other competitive subscription services rely on Microsoft's DRM, an arguably inferior technology

Apple's strategy was based on customer research and market knowledge: music lovers want to own their music, a claim that Steve Jobs has repeated on the record many times. The entrenched culture of music ownership is not rental, and this culture is at least 80 years old (longer, if you consider that buying sheet music, not renting it, was the industry standard prior to the advent of the phonograph.) This is not a defensive strategy motivated by fear. It is a logical way to meet the market's expectations. There is no reason to want Apple to abandon the current ownership business model with iTunes, unless of course the market undergoes a large shift in behavior. And in that case, it's also perfectly logical for Apple to let someone else commit massive resources to fundamentally changing the market.

What the subscription model people continually avoid is the ultraslim margins involved--rental price points are severely undervalued and almost certainly will need to rise. Imagine this: you like the hundred or so songs you download and have to pay $240 per year for the next ten years just to keep listening to them--if the company you're renting them from goes under, you're screwed. You're locked into paying whatever the subscription is, even if it goes up, forever. It's a bad deal, and consumers recognize this.

Fairplay (i.e. Apple) is the growing industry standard.

MacDailyNews notates the losers in the war; Betamax, 8-track, and 78 rpm standard bearers join in the alligator tears

Money quote:

"It's the losers (Napster, Microsoft, Sony, Creative, iRiver, RealNetworks, etc.) that are whining. Not music buyers. Not music player buyers. Not Apple. Apple is too busy selling iPods and music online to care about the losers' sour grapes."

When Microsoft develops industry standards--including standards that the market accepts, validates, and essentially ratifies--it's okay. But when Apple does it, somehow it's bad? This chorus of crying is coming from losers who think that OpenSource is still the answer. It's not, when it comes to DRM.

"New Revenue Models" or "Old Ideas With New Names"

The only "new" revenue models being developed for the music industry are directly related to technological advances.

Consider Coolfer's recent post:

Coolfer: Labels Look To New Models: "Coolfer readers have known this for some time. I've discussed the various revenue streams outside of album sales: album downloads, single downloads, music and video streaming, ringtones and music DVDs. Staggering the release dates of ringtones, singles and albums is sensible strategy. JupiterResearch analyst David Card said 'windows is more the natural order of things, with multiple packages and multiple release times.'"

Downloading revenue is in its infancy, and unfortunately, the context of this promising technology is hogtied to current distribution--it's not profitable yet because there is a cash cow (CDs) and other entrenched options already in place.

But going after alternative revenue streams has been a component of successful music managers since, well, forever. And rather than focus on the slim margins associated with downloads (and ringtones) just because the participation is going upward rapidly, more profitable areas of revenue such as television advertising, song placement, artist placement, and other promotional concepts not directly tied to sales. Yes, we can all anticipate a future where downloading/streaming/video is profitable, but that can only come at the abandonment of CD distribution. Enhancing the value proposition of music is probably more what Coolfer is intimating here, not exploiting other revenue streams.

As for the multiple windows concept, well, that's old news, too (with the exception of the ringtones phenomena.) The industry's always staggered release dates with singles and albums (and radio), so adding ringtones to the mix hardly seems like any degree of intellectual insight. Of course it's the natural order of things when that's the way things have been done for the past four decades.

I'd have been impressed with a more novel discussion of these issues, such as: what is the impact of digital distribution on windows releasing? How long will people want Muzak-sounding ringtones before they can hear the real thing, and is that a legitimate window? What would happen if there were no windows? In the age of digital duplication how secure is the windows release system? What is Jupiter Research learning about the fad of ringtones? Can margins and price points be increased in downloading or ringtones?

Music industry worried about CD burning

USATODAY.com - Music industry worried about CD burning

As well they should be.

When I was an undergraduate, I lived in a fraternity house with 40-50 other members. It was common for members to copy a CD with an audio cassette. It was never a case where one guy bought a CD and then everyone copied it to their own personal cassette tape, but I'm pretty sure that "sharing" is a lot more common these days in settings such as this.

Let's consider the source of this story: the RIAA. And let's consider the RIAA's misguided past, the organization's penchant for blaming the industry's massive piracy problem on kids instead of pointing their resources and fingers at the real problem: global piracy. The reason the Industry needs copy control mechanisms is to fight piracy overseas, where it's arguably a much larger problem.

UPDATE: The Big Picture: More RIAA sponsored nonsense debunks the CD burning issue succinctly.

A layman's description of rent vs. own model of digital distribution

Downloadable music business: Rent, lease or sell? - Technology - International Herald Tribune

Without a major shift in paradigm--music ownership is at least three generations old now--renting or leasing of music is going to be a hard sell. Renting/Leasing's major hurdles:

1) physical portability
2) technological entrenchment of competing design (ownership)
3) culture barriers directly related to the product
4) emotional barriers related to the product
5) financial barriers to the business model i.e. do you think an artist is going to be happy that people only have to pay $10 a month to download thousands of songs? Someone (like me) should do a NPV of renting a library vs. owning one.

So, what are you listening to? How did you hear about them?

When people find out my occupation, many will ask, "So, what's really great?" Many times a discussion will ensue, generally beginning with me never being able to remember whom I'm currently really raving about. But many times, the discussion will turn on, "How did you find about about them? Are they on the radio? Did you see them play out?"

There are sights on the web that puport to link musical interests...you enter an act's name, the site tells you other acts you might like based on that. Other sites purport to show band lineages and the like. But that really doesn't turn the lens on your own collection that much, in as far as it doesn't show your own lineage to that act...I'm on a lot of promotional lists for labels, so I get music sent my way all the time, and that clouds the issue a bit as well. There are many acts who've lost their lineage to me in the sands of time. Still, with all that's been written about the Internets and the impact of technology, I wonder how much it's affected my musical preferences--I grew up in a small, rural town where my musical options were essentially limited to two rock stations. I didn't have MTV or a record store (the nearest was 40 miles away) and my record collection back in the mid-80s reflected that.

Anyway, here are ten random albums from this year (in no order, and by no means will they necessarily be on my favorites list by the end of December), and how they came into my life. I suppose that it would be nice of me to post MP3 samples as well, but that's too much hassle.

The Hold Steady - Separation Sunday
I've read Michaelangelo Matos' blog since it debuted, pretty much. He's a writer from Minneapolis with a Prince fetish, and while we don't share too much musically, he's always raved about this band called Lifter/Puller (which disbanded, moved to Brooklyn, and became The Hold Steady.) I never bothered to check out their work, but Matos really raved about this one and I finally caved. If their back catalog is anything like this album, then they are one of my favorite bands of the past five years.

...Trail of Dead - Worlds Apart
I reviewed their first album in 1998, and hated it. I hated their name, I hated the music, I hated it all. I gave them another chance in 2002 when their flack sent me Source Tag & Codes and I accidentally played it...ended up enjoying that album a lot, just in time to find Pitchfork on the bandwagon. In some ways I was excited about Worlds Apart, and I actually pestered the label far in advance to get it. It's ultimately disappointing.

Amy Ray - Prom
Daemon (Ray's label, literally) sends me a lot and most of it is average. The heart is there but the fact is that I don't think much of it. Her last solo album was noisy and far from Indigo country, but I didn't love it as much as I'd hoped. But Prom is stellar, a set of songs that sort of revolve around being gay in high school. This was sent to me far in advance, and I've enjoyed it a lot.

Bob Mould - Body of Song
Mould's output since Husker Du is completely underrated; that he's still known for what amounts to be poorly recorded versions of arguably very good songs is kind of funny to me. His first solo album is still his high water mark, but Body of Song is a fantastic comeback for a guy who looked like he'd lost his way on Modulate. I heard that this leaked, and I ran it down on a P2P network, which is something I haven't done in years. Mould was PISSED about this happening. I don't blame the guy. Really, I don't. But, I don't feel too sorry for him. He is in total control of his career, and it's time we stop pretending that advance copies of albums are necessary AT ALL. They aren't, Bob. Get over it. And that's what leaked. It's high time that artists start repaying their fans first--someone explain to me why we treat an album release as a movie premier, anyway? This same thing happened earlier this year with Sleater-Kinney and they are just as ignorant. The Mould reaction was disappointing in that you would think he would know better. Stop giving out your music first to everyone but your fans and the problem will disappear. And yeah, I got a legitimate disc from Yep Roc six weeks later.

The Jayhawks - Live From the Women's Club, Volume 2
Yep, I had to buy this. The Jayhawks essentially self-released this disc to sell at shows; the first one they did was a big hit that got bootlegged and sold on eBay until the band realized what they had on their hands. It's funny--you'd think a band on a major label would be selling exclusive stuff on their website as well as selling it at shows. The idea that it makes a show more valuable if you can only buy stuff at the show is laughable in the Internet Age.

John Cougar Mellencamp - Small Town (acoustic version)
While I wish iTunes sold songs in lossless quality, it's nice to avoid crass commerical cash-ins by being able to buy "re-issue only" tracks on the Internet. Now, if only this was standard practice.

LCD Soundsystem - s/t
There is this website called I Love Music and it's basically a message board type of site that a lot of music geeks and writers around the world participate in. Some of the most knowledgeable people, and some of the most curious. The near universal acclaim for LCD Soundsystem made me seek them out despite the nature of the music. And frankly, I wasn't disappointed. It's good. (See also: M.I.A., the Mountain Goats.)

Joy Zipper - American Whip
This is an American duo whose release only saw its debut in the United States this year, while this was released last year in the U.K. Odd that they are more popular outside of their own country, but it's not as rare as you might think. This was send my way blindly by an editor and I ended up interviewing the band for a feature. By the time the article ran, Joy Zipper had already released their follow-up album to American Whip. In Europe, of course. Why oh why can't iTunes et all solve this problem so I don't have to shell out $25 for the import.

Sufjan Stevens - Come On Feel the Illinoise!
I vaguely remember reading about this guy and thinking he was some world music artist (gringoism alert!) and dismissing him entirely until Largehearted Boy started pimping his praises. I got an advance and have been happily ever after.

Moonbabies - War On Sound EP
Coolfer's four-word description led to a website streaming preview and a call to the publicist. A great tip-off for a band I'm really excited about right now.

The Path of Least Resistance and why it's changing the fundamentals of the music business

Mark Cuban, basketball guy, has been talking about the path of least resistance, and how, as a consumer behavior, it affects things.

And oh how it also explains a lot of things that are happening in the music business. How is that?

The path of least resistance lets me now:

- avoid nasty indie record stores
- find nearly anything I want and order it instantly
- find nearly everything I want and pay much less
- purchase one track at a time for dirt cheap
- makes my entire collection portable AND in higher quality
- allows me to have most of my music anywhere I want it
- buy tickets in advance without having to wait in line
- aggregate many opinions about something before buying
- barebones distribution costs
- lower marketing costs
- lower cashflow requirements
- lower breakeven points
- lower barriers to entry
- more efficient use of time

All of this comes from technological advances, advances that, on the surface, might appear to be paths of more resistance. But they're not. These choices are so obvious that they are the paths of least resistance. The problem is that so many people are in denial of this.

Mark Cuban: why oh why won't he spend his money on fixing the music industry

The definition of insanity.. The Music Industry - Blog Maverick

He's at it again, and yet I'm pretty confident that no one who matters is either reading what Cuban has to say or taking it seriously.

But he strikes upon a key to marketing in general:

Insanity is ignoring year after year, the demographics with more money than time. Those who aren’t willing, or don’t have the time to troll through the net to figure out which network has the most music to download, searching for songs, picking out which peers to try to download from and then hoping it all worked out right. Those who would prefer to just buy music in the easiest way possible so they can get on with enjoying their music and their lives. Isn’t that why we buy bottled water? It’s easy and convenient?

College kids, arthouse kids, urban white kids, and high school students are the biggest consumers of music. They're also the poorest. So is it any surprise that the digital revolution exploded in their demographic? Nevermind that they had fast, free Internet to burn at all the universities--when I was an undergraduate back in the 80s, CDs were passed around the fraternity house on a daily basis in order to copy via cassette tape.

This demographic DOES however also tend to spend money on live performance. They buy the T-shirts. They go to the all-ages shows. They created the underground, the punk scene, and the college town tour circuit in the 80s that led to mega careers for REM and U2.

This group of people will want to consume massive amounts of music no matter the barriers, whether it's DRM or anything else. They ride the paradigm shift of digital distribution every day, and, like getting penny pitchers for a $5 cover, they aren't going to abandon the binge.

Cuban also points out that the labels are pissing their brands down the drain. All the old timers in the music business LOVE to crow about the good old days, when Arista and Warners and all the rest were a stable with a meaning. This was true for the majors and the indies, where you would buy EVERYTHING on Twin/Tone just because you loved the Replacements or you'd trust anything on Geffen because the Eagles were on there. Instead, Cuban notes, it's the download services and digital interfaces that are doing all the branding now...Amazon, eMusic, iTunes Music Store, etc. are all very concerned with being a part of the equation. It's sad--you go to most major label websites and it's a vomitorium of bad flash, six thousand points of promotion, and virtually NO IDENTITY. Those major label corporate websites look like the sausage factories that we think they are, pimping the whore of the day on the front page and little else. No exclusive content, DRM coming out the ass...NO VALUE, NO REWARDS. Just flackery of the worst kind.

I've long said that the music business isn't ruined, that the majors actually are sitting on a load of opportunity if no other reason than they have cash flow and reserves to try to shoot the moon. The problem is that no one really has the balls to do it--everyone's afraid of a big misstep that will ruin the company. But in the face of ANOTHER signficant decline in business, by the time anyone has the courage to take a big risk, there won't be enough resources left to fund it.