Insider bashes music majors — Interview with Peter Jenner
No, after a long day at work I’m not coming up with a better headline than The Register:
Big labels are f*cked, and DRM is dead – Peter Jenner
This is a wonderful interview with Peter Jenner, ex-manager of Pink Floyd and The Clash, now secretary general of the International Music Manager’s Forum. Live, he’s a very enticing speaker, and he doesn’t hold back in this interview either. Do not read on if you object to explicit language:
You said that at In The City, the big label executives have lost their faith in DRM – they don’t believe in it any more.
They don’t. Not anymore.
And that was done by Sony BMG – what the fuck was that [rootkit DRM] about? The other was iTunes – and they’ve seen how kids don’t like it. The unitary payment doesn’t suit the technology, it doesn’t suit how they’re actually using downloads – which is to explore and move around. You don’t want to pay a dollar for each track when you want to explore music.
Ranting about the music industry majors can be a bit gratuitous, considering that everyone with an eyeball or two of their own can see the sorry state they’re in. But Peter Jenner actually knows his stuff. Yes, it’s a rant, but it’s pretty well-founded. Whether it’s about blanket licensing, the broken business model of major labels, or the sharing of profits — Jenner gives us the works:
What’s important is what’s your bottom line, for Christ’s sake.
The blanket licensing thing is obviously going to slash your unit margin. The record companies have increased their margin on downloads, because the costs have been ripped out. So they’ve cut the artists royalties and raised their margin.
But because they’ve replaced an album with a single they’ve helped destroy the retail industry, they’re now in a position where they’re completely fucked.
No one’s got any sympathy or love for them, because they’ve systematically been shoring up their figures in the short run – squeezing money into Universal to make up for their catastrophies; Warner Brothers have been coping with huge debt; EMI have been desperately trying to hold their stock price up so somebody would buy them; BMG has been wondering how the fuck they’re going to pay somebody back money for whatever it was, so they don’t go public – and Sony are in a terminal mess.
So all of them have been draining profit. It’s "get the money in, boys, get the money in. "
So they’ve raped them. They’ve raped their whole business model, and no one’s got the time or energy to think about their business.
I’d love to believe him that DRM is dead and blanket licenses for music are just a few years away . But somehow I don’t think it’s all going to come that easily. It’ll take us a lot of work.
via drm.info