Pribek

MIDEM is a big music conference that is put on in France every year. I don’t really know who all goes to this thing. A bunch of guys from my Reader are there; “futurists”, music business “experts” and such. I suspect that some folks that are actually still in the music industry attend as well.

It’s pricey to attend. I checked in to it one time and it was one of those, if I had that kind of dough, I wouldn’t need to see these guys, kind of deals.

Anyway, MIDEM has been going on over the last, I don’t know, week, week and a half, something like that. The stuff I will be quoting here came from a Yahoo via Reuters piece about MIDEM.

The music industry needs to learn from the “dark side of the Internet” that has so decimated its business if it is to ever regain the upper hand in the fight against piracy.

Learn from the “dark side of the Internet”? There’s kind of a romance about that, the “dark side of the Internet”. Same thing with “pirate”. If you say stealing or thief, people get a little geechy but, swashbuckling on the dark side, that sounds pretty neat.

After years of trying to protect its content and sue anyone who illegally downloaded it, the industry has moved to forge partnerships with online retailers as sales slump.

Here we go again; “illegally downloaded”. That’s like “pre-owned cars”. But, the worst part of the above is, “sue anyone”. Anyone. The music business has tried to sue anyone who stole music.

And, in the very next paragraph…

In 2008, some 95 percent of the music downloaded from the Internet, or more than 40 billion files, was illegal, leaving the overall music market down around 7 percent on 2007.

40 Billion, let’s see, 95 percent of that would be 38 Billion. 38 Billion tracks stolen last year alone. The RIAA has filed around 33,00 total lawsuits against “pirates”. How could you write in one paragraph, that the music industry is trying to sue “anyone” and, in the next paragraph bust out those figures? How could you do that?

See, that kind of stuff is pervasive. It’s tantamount to propaganda.

These next quotes are from David Eun of Google, the owner of YouTube.

“Being partners means that you work together … and you don’t necessarily presume that the other person is trying to screw you frankly,” he told the audience at Cannes.

The guy is saying that the music business thinks YouTube and thus, Google are trying to screw them or, the other way around? Either way, it’s a bold statement. That’s saying, “we are in the power seat here”. And, he can get away with it because people are conditioned to justification. People think, YouTube good…music business bad.

YouTube uses music the same way that a traditional radio station does. They use music to bring the people in and sell them stuff. A radio station pays the people who create that music (or the people who hold the rights) every time they play a song. YouTube doesn’t.

And, the big secret nobody talks about is this; if YouTube was making a rat killing by selling advertising then, they wouldn’t be going around saying that anybody is trying to screw anybody. They would be raving about their financial success and touting themselves as the savior of the music industry.

More from Mr. Eun…

“There’s a culture where it’s: this is my interests, meet them. And … what you find is I think a risk that you decrease the number of companies and partners that you have.”

I love the way this guy talks, a culture. It’s the culture of my way or the highway. What does this mean? Does this mean, YouTube can get along just fine without Warner Brothers or, does it mean we are not going to wipe all the tracks as has been widely publicized?

“So the question I pose to you and everyone in the industry is, how much innovation is really going on in the music industry and how much more could there be.”

This is a common misconception. People commonly mistake “innovation” for creativity. Tech guys do this all the time. They think that when they come up with some new interface or algorithm, they are being creative when actually they are innovating existing creativity.

Innovation is overrated.

Music isn’t about innovation, it’s about creativity. Creativity exists without innovation yet, what good is innovation without creativity?

What good is your tiny device that holds 8,000 songs if you don’[t have songs to fill it with? What good is your cloud technology if you don’t have creative works to put in the cloud?

I’m not saying there is going to be a finite amount of creative work. Creative people create.

By the same token, innovative people innovate. What’s to stop someone for coming up with a way to track Google’s every move and blow their safe harbor all to hell? What’s to stop somebody from coming up with an efficient way to garner revenue and pay an honest buck for the creative content that brings the traffic?

For my taste, Google is sounding a little too much like the big talking, cocky guy that really doesn’t want to get in that bar fight. The people in the bar are always ready to believe that guy until it actually comes to blows.