About That Book

Former Reader scribe Bill Wyman just pretty much wrote -- or at least paraphrased -- the very short version of it for me in a post about Pandora:

1) The music industry uses its ferocious lobbying power to get laws or regulations that break its way
2) As a result, promising new models for the industry get stifled
3) What do survive are big-money operations that screw their customers and get in bed with the industry
4) The result is an inferior version of a potentially superior product—in this case for example “internet radio” that sounds a lot like “Clear Channel radio,” laden with commercials and compromised by payola or its equivalent

In the old days, that would be the end of the story. Today, of course, it’s not. It just means listeners will gravitate to illegal downloading and sharing and passing around music with no royalties at all for the artists. Here again, the industry, with a screw-the-customer mentality deep in its DNA, is busily trying to charge people more for a crummy product when the audience has a better one available free.

Well, maybe that's not totally it, but it certainly hits on a theme I've been thinking about a lot with regard to the record industry.