Why Everyone Hates The Music Industry

TechWeb: Why Everyone Hates The Music Industry

Fredric Paul thinks that the record companies' "real problem" isn't that that the times are a changin' but that "everyone hates them."

Wrong.

Nobody except musicians, sympathetic writers, and the punk rock community hates the record companies. Consumers ("music lovers" to Mr. Paul), by and large, don't care much about the companies. They just want to buy or steal good music. They don't care where it comes from or how it gets there. They don't blame the labels for high prices. They blame BestBuy or some other retailer.

As an explanation, musicians hate the record companies because they are The Man. The naive, the stupid, and the willfully ignorant typically blame record companies for problems that are usually self-inflicted: knowingly signing bad deals, signing away control, etc. Sympathetic writers hear the same stories every day about the labels and perpetuate myth after myth without ever demanding accountability from the artists. The punk rock community, well, that's kind of a joke--of course they hate the labels. They want anarchy for everything!

Mr. Paul genuflects over a report pointing the finger at media "monocultures" from Forrester Research. Monocultures are not unique to media--the record companies are displaying classic mature industry behavior, something I've elaborated on many times over the past year. The behavior of the record labels is not surprising, it's academically predictable.