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.