Tuesday, January 29, 2008

The Money Shot: U2's Manager and Music Labels Decide Your ISP is The Problem While The WSJ Gets Clued In That Digital Is The Future of Music...

Headlines, headlines, headlines...

Music Firms Want EU to Cut Off Pirates (Business Week)
MS: "Up until now, ISPs have allowed copyright theft to run rampant on their networks, causing a massive devaluation of copyrighted music," said John Kennedy, the CEO of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the record industry trade association. "The time for action is now -- from the EU and other governments."


Playing the blame game in the music biz (LA Times)
MS: In a keynote address to several hundred convention delegates, McGuinness, who has managed U2 since the band started, directly attacked the creators and operators of ISPs, saying, "I think the failure of ISPs to engage in the fight against piracy, to date, has been the single biggest failure in the digital music market.

"They are the gatekeepers with the technical means to make a far greater impact on mass copyright violation than the tens of thousands of lawsuits taken out against individual file sharers," he said. "To me, prosecuting the customer is counterintuitive, though I recognize that these prosecutions have an educational and propaganda effect, however small, in showing that stealing music is wrong."


Beyond the Album (Wall Street Journal)
MS: The music industry likes to say the CD can't compete with free, but that's missing the point. The real problem -- as those kids showed EMI so devastatingly -- is that the physical increasingly can't compete with the digital. (Or maybe they didn't care about Coldplay and Robbie Williams.) The music industry's experiments with various new CD formats -- the CD-View Plus, ringle, etc. -- are doomed because they still depend on a plastic disc fewer and fewer people want.

But if the CD is dying, will the album follow?


Listen to Musical Justice

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