Music people have the crazies again.
The latest nut case is Irving Azoff who had been threatening to remove 42 of his very heavyweight clients’ music representing some 20,000 works from YouTube.
Now Azoff has gone and done it – or at least he’s trying to do it.
YouTube is apparently defying him saying that they have a deal in place.
This is all about greed as it has always been for the record business.
It’s about histrionics such as saying streaming services like YouTube are exploiting musicians.
It is the music industry that wanted Spotify and made it damn difficult for them to launch on schedule here in the U.S. because of brass knuckle negotiations and even that was not enough to please them because their take is not enough.
They hate Pandora but Pandora is the largest supplier of digital revenue to the music industry and that money represents fully over 50% of everything Pandora earns.
These haters have even turned on the pathetic radio industry, which has become an imitation of its former self with computerized music, no personalities and repetition that drives listeners away.
The music industry is against anything that works for their partners that doesn’t work better for them.
They got handed their lunch by a bunch of kids at Napster.
Then they let Steve Jobs bamboozle them into a deal to let his iPod users cherry pick music all because they were paranoid about Napster.
Who knew? Cherry picking was the undoing of the album.
All as CD sales plummeted.
When Pandora started the labels demanded huge royalties that were insane for any business startup.
Flo & Eddie should have stuck to “Happy Together” when they “won” legal battles for music royalties for their old work.
The labels did a stick up on satellite radio, which passes its fees along to its subscribers.
They tried to sue the pants off kids who pirated music and the kids won.
Now, no one even wants to steal music because while these selfish bastards were out screwing up the digital business model consumers started using their music like ketchup instead of a main course.
Taylor Swift pulls her new album “1989” from Spotify because her label wanted to make a statement but that statement is – we don’t want to be where listeners are going unless you want to overpay.
And if you think I am hard on the music industry, maybe.
Maybe not.
Music ain’t what it used to be.
And people don’t value it the way baby boomers worshiped their vinyl albums.
The radio industry helped commoditize music by making it vanilla.
So here’s the verdict.
Azoff will lose.
The kids will win again.
But Irving will stuff his pockets with more money while his clients will be affected by his lack of good judgment. He’s acting like – well, a baby boomer who doesn’t understand the new digital world.
Buying music is over – iTunes the biggest online retailer has proven that the decline is real. If they can’t sell music, no one can.
No one buys CDs.
They listen to streaming services largely for free and that’s about it, folks.
Have they not learned anything from the path of destruction the music industry has been on for the past 15 years?
95 million Millennials are their bosses.
Music will eventually be free and the labels blew their business model.
I’m betting that the Millennials will win this one again.
Cooperate with the inevitable.
Come up with a new business model or Millennials will.
Radio, are you listening?
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