The iPhone was the next Nirvana

20 years on from the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, there are plenty of people asking which album of recent years we’ll all be looking back at in the 2030s as a seminal masterpiece. I’m making a case that the next Nirvana, was not a band at all, but a mobile phone.

In 2006, I was travelling on a bus from London to Cardiff, en route I was working, replying to emails, taking calls, playing Fifa 07,  listening to music, arranging my night out via SMS – all from my mobile phone. I felt like a wizard. No one else on the bus had the kind of power I had with my Nokia N95.  Even if they had, it’s very likely they wouldn’t have known how to wield it with such devastating precision and grace.

To accomplish the above feats of mobile computing took a great deal of figuring out how to navigate sub menus, sync mail servers, transfer music from CD to MP3 to PC to phone, download 3rd party apps for gaming and productivity and so on. Pretty standard fare these days, but this was 2006.  When it came to mobile computing, I was a virtuoso, taking my device to the limits of its capabilities. This seemed like a glorious future, one where I had the upper hand on the sticky masses, untethered from my desktop, free.

The iPhone annoyed me. It annoyed me in the same way that the emergence of Nirvana as a dominant force in rock music must have annoyed Axl Rose. The mobile web was for people with technical competence – geeks – what the hell was Apple playing at putting it in the hands of people on the street?

I nearly lost it one day when some bozo with an iPhone started showing me how he could use Google maps to find his way to the pub. HE was showing ME how to use the internet. The nerve!

I duly whipped out my freshly upgraded N96 and began showing him how I could do exactly the same thing on my Nokia. Just hold on while it loads. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. Wait, it’s crashed, I’ll just pop out the battery and boot it up. It’s really good when it works. Hang on. Time passes. The subject changes. I feel like a bozo.

I remember where I was when I first heard the Sex Pistols. I was 15 years old, and on the stairs in my family home, my older brother was blaring out Holidays in the Sun. Earlier that year he’d gotten me heavily into Led Zepplin, and I couldn’t get my head around this noise I was now hearing. Then a Month or so later it clicked.

Nevermind the buttons

As an aspiring drummer, I’d listened in rapt awe to the syncopations of John Bonham, trying my best to get my head around what he was doing on the drumkit. With the Sex Pistols, I could already play every drum part in the entire album. It was a life changing revelation – it meant I could be in a band!

This is the key to punk rock – it takes creativity out of the hands of the virtuoso; anyone can play guitar!  Succesive generations of kids got this same revelation, leading from Wire and Joy Division through to Husker Du, the Butthole Surfers and the Melvins terminating at Nirvana.  Nirvana had the same effect on the mainstream of music as did the Sex Pistols in the 70s, but on a much grander scale. While Nevermind is being rightly remembered as a watershed cultural achievement, the iPhone will be remembered in 30 years time for similar cultural reasons and with similar cultural results.

The capacitive touchscreen user interface was the Smells Like Teen Spirit moment of the internet.

In the same way that Nirvana pissed off Guns n’ Roses by making them look like ridiculous posturing fools, Apple subverted its competition leaving them flat footed and gasping. Example: take a look at Android’s UI circa 2006:

Android circa 2006, not cool.

Likewise, both Nirvana and Apple came onto the scene as underdogs and have struggled to keep their cred in the face of mainstream acceptance. I am not going to draw any parallels between Steve Jobs and Kurt Cobain.

In summary, punk rock is all about disrupting the mainstream, and the iPhone was the most punk rock thing to happen since Nevermind hit the charts.  Ever feel like you’ve been cheated?

 

Mobile World Congress: indigested

Back in 2005 everything seemed to be about ARPU; Average Revenue Per User. The long game for mobile network operators was about a race to the bottom in voice/sms revenue, and the only way out was data services. Which is why back then the annual mobile industry back slapathon was called “3GSM”, because 3G was about to make everyone rich!

Except it didn’t.

For years, the only use case for 3G was checking the football scores on a Saturday afternoon, even that activity was often unsatisfying due to the need to access the “Vodafone Internet” and pay “Incomprehensible Per MB Rates”. Remember the dread of checking your phone in 2007, to find you’d bum dialled the internet at some point, and had been walking around town all day downloading the entire web?

The other problem was the hardware. We didn’t know it at the time, but the phones were rubbish. If things hadn’t changed, we’d all be carrying 24 MP camera phones covered in fiddly little buttons. It’s no wonder that data services weren’t taking off given the user experience served up by the operators and OEMs.

In 2005 the typical sales pitch of a typical vendor in the telecoms space always included the ARPU acronym; “we can help you to increase your ARPU”. I’ve not heard that acronym in a while, and I don’t remember seeing one vendor still selling ARPU at MWC this year. This is an important shift because it shows that the game has changed; people are no longer selling greed (make MORE money out of your customers!). But what are they selling?

The biggest buzzword by a country mile was “ecosystem”. Everyone was talking about ecosystems; how to build them, how to play a specific role in one, where to be in one, where not to be in one and so on. Evolution is a theme that feeds into this idea; ecosystems in nature evolve and mature over time. It seems at the moment the common perception is that there are slots within an emerging ecosystem that are up for grabs – the higher up the food chain you can get, the safer you’ll be as the ecosystem evolves.
So the role of the operator in this new ecosystem has yet to be defined. My favourite overheard remark of the whole show was “tiered pricing is still just being a pipe”. As a strategy, the tiered model has bought operators some leverage with the content owners, but it does not prevent them from being disintermediated from the end user. This is where the new selling angle to operators is in 2011, vendors are no longer selling greed (ARPU), they are selling fear: “buy our products or be disintermediated by the disruptive power of the internet”.

[Side note: Thankfully, acronyms are becoming increasingly remote in this industry, this is because if you differentiate yourself by selling a technology, you will be undercut as that technology inevitably gets cheaper over time, forcing you to add features and cut prices. This is the downward spiral of declining ASP that manufacturers of VHS players are very familiar with]

Apparently there were other exhibitors at the Mobile World Congress this year. I don't remember seeing any though

The way to sell to operators today is to talk about the role they want to have in the ecosystem, and how your solutions can help them to secure that role. A great way of contextualising this conversation is to point to other industries where the major players have not adapted, and the disruption has disintermediated them from the end users, marginalising their role in the ecosystem. The Record Industry is a great analogy here. Those idiots sat on their hands for YEARS, following idiotically short-sighted policies, refusing to acknowledge that they needed to adapt. The result has been amusing for those of us with a keen sense of Schadenfreude and an unsuccessful music career in their past, and the prospect of the same fate befalling network operators is not only very real, it is a key driver of today’s mobile industry.

So, what conclusions? Google’s total domination of the Mobile World congress was shocking. Anssi Vanjoki’s analogy about OEMs turning to Android being akin to Finnish boys peeing their pants for warmth seems apt. Google has very successfully gotten everyone hooked on the Android crack. No one is talking about what Google needs to do to remain relevant in this space, it seems to be wordlessly acknowledged that whatever anyone else does, Google is king.

Tl;dr: Operators have to up their game.

Security Theatre: the Trial of Paul Chambers

Paul Chambers is currently a criminal because he tweeted “****! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your s*** together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high”

Security Theater is a term that describes security countermeasures intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually improve security.

Theatre, in the genre of tragic farce, is the consequence of unwittingly provoking Britain’s Dad’s Army of anti terror surveillance officers and Paul Chambers is our plucky anti-hero in this comedy of errors.

The convergence of social media (and its ambivalence toward personal privacy) with the intrusiveness of the security services have given us a society so concerned with protecting us, it is smothering us.

I’m writing about this because Paul Chambers, someone with whom I am faintly acquainted on Twitter, was appealing his conviction for the above crime in court this week, the same week I encountered the term “Security Theatre” courtesy of Reddit

Consider that you cannot take anything sharp through airport security, and yet there are an abundance of sharp things for sale in the departure lounge. The purpose of security theatre is not to make airports safer, but to demonstrate order and control to and over obedient passengers. Terrorists can work within these systems, as was highlighted by the cases of Richard Reid and the underpants bombers (who, amusingly, are a wedding band in a parallel dimension).

At an airport departure lounge, these artificial scenarios of control and order are fine and appropriate, to an extent; no one expects an airport security official to have a sense of humour, or the inclination to use his or her common sense when assessing a potential threat; given the stakes, you expect everything to be done by the book.

However, for us to continue enjoying the freedoms that have provided a membrane of ideological justification to our military’s recent Middle Eastern misadventures, there has to be a common sense filter for security services monitoring social networks. The consequence of international terrorism might be heightened security, but it must not be the criminalisation of banter.

There’s no Justice Like Internet Justice

Up until the start of the 21st century you could reasonably expect to be able to get away with throwing your neighbour’s cat in a wheelie bin without being subject to frothing global hysteria.

These days, aside from the usual instruments of justice as applied by the state – which have evolved over centuries and form a core and essential part of a functioning modern democracy – we also now have the giant roving eye of the hive mind to keep everyone in check.

The sort of personality quirk that could lead a batty old lady to throw a cat in a bin and walk away is the type of worryingly deviant behaviour that the courts of the nation, bafflingly for some, have no time for. Therefore it is up to the comment writers of the Internet to condemn this deviancy and sentence the offender to MASSIVE, MASSIVELY PUBLIC SHAME!

This vile person should be put in a dustbin for 16 hours.

The mere fact that police protection was required to protect the offender is a measure of how powerful internet justice is. Internet justice has no moral codes beyond the kneejerk reactions of anonymous commentators, no official procedures, checks, balances, appeals courts, protocols, precedents, its judges are anonymous and totally unaccountable, and the laws of this court are made up as it goes along.

There is little justification for throwing a cat in a bin, and it’s good that the lady in question was caught doing it – she thoroughly earned her visit from the RSPCA and the distain of her neighbourhood. This is an appropriate punishment for what she did. The internet justice meted out via the hysterical death threats and global notoriety is not only far beyond the pale, but have terrifying implications for all of us.

What if you one day get caught doing something the internet doesn’t like? Bearing in mind the chances of whatever it is being caught on film and uploaded to Youtube increase exponentially as the Hive Mind’s little 5MP eyes get embedded into everything around you.

It’s fair to say that catinbingate was the perfect storm of internet justice, being that it involved a cat (I wonder what the reaction of the Court of the Web would have been had it been a pigeon?), but there are many ways to upset the internet. So watch your step out there.

Oh noes it am wheelie bin tiem?

UPDATE: Hadn’t seen it when I wrote this post, but this is exactly what I’m talking about:

All bits are equal, but some bits are more equal than others

The information revolution is overthrowing the old media barons, but what is it replacing them with?

When Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace for a trillion pounds it was funny; it was like your dad coming back from holiday early to find you holding a house party, and deciding to try to liven it up by putting on his Fleetwood Mac collection.

Murdoch’s Myspace acquisition is an interesting case study of Old Media attempting to compete with New Media using Old Media strategies. The Old way of dealing with an upstart competitor is to just buy it – but in the case of Myspace, the assets are the users, once they all migrate to Facebook and Twitter, you’re left with some very expensive code and a LOT of spam. (Just ask ITV about Friends Reunited.)

The internet has disrupted the broadcast and print media industries dramatically – TV reporters of the California Earthquake earlier this year resorted to live broadcasting the Twitter feed of eye witnesses, whilst print media is battling for its very survival with experimental monetisation strategies. Against this backdrop is the assumption that the new disrupting entrants are spearheading a popular revolution against the media baron model of the 20th century, and towards a democratised open web, where information is free and abundant, and where the political agendas of the elite are of no more consequence than the ranting of bloggers.

Howlin' Mad Murdoch

However, aside from decimating the career opportunities of aspiring investigative journalists; as in all revolutions, this is a transfer of power from one elite to the next. But where is this power being transferred and what are the likely consequences of this transferal?

Well to answer the first part of that question is fairly straightforward; just take a look at your browsing history. Google, Amazon, Facebook – these companies have more information about you than you like to think about, and they have very, very clever people working on ways of exploiting this information for profit. But there are others. Just last year the BBC accused BT of throttling the download speeds of people trying to use its popular service. The ISP & network operators have a huge amount of control over the information that crosses their networks, we’re beginning to see that control asserted more in the mobile space as operators introduce tiered pricing strategies designed to give them the initiative over network intensive services.

This is an example of the tension between the content owner’s services, consumer demand, and the expensively provisioned networks over which these services are delivered. There currently isn’t much by way of regulation to make sure that information is treated equally regardless of its origin or destination. This means that (as in the case of the iPlayer and BT), your network operator can decide whether you can look at certain types of content.

So the control of information is moving toward the content owners and the network operators, the second part of the question concerns the implications for society. The Net Neutrality debate is part of the battle for control of the web; as new technologies emerge that further connect and describe our social interactions, purchases, movements, thoughts, desires, and likely actions, the control of this information will become increasingly vital for commercial organisations.

The recent Google/Verizon proposals for net neutrality prove the ambition of corporations to avoid regulations, and attempt to commercialise mobile network traffic – this sets a trajectory for a new media elite, where networks and content owners collude to agree which types of data running on which types of software platform reach which types of people. In this scenario, the effects on society depend entirely on the benevolence of the media owner, or the strength of regulatory environment. I guess we’ll have to pray Google lives up to its motto.

The iPhone is the new Filofax and you are a yuppie

Examining the Apple backlash

A well publicized recent survey has waded into the fashionable anti-Apple sentiment which seems to have pervaded the media ever since the iPhone 4’s antenna issues came to light. Apple has always been a fertile source of copy for the media – I can tell you from my blog stats that writing about Apple attracts far more eyeballs than writing practically anything else. I also know from my experience, if someone tweets a hysterical headline involving Apple, I will likely click the link.

This phenomenon is great for Apple when the headlines are all positive, as they rightly have been since the turn of the millennium; its success has seemingly become a self-perpetuating feedback loop as each new product generates frothing coverage. Its creation and domination of new markets is the stuff of legend, they’ve turned entire industries upside down, and created new ones from scratch and almost effortlessly.
One of the many by-products of this staggering rise has been the evolution of a marketing super-demographic; Apple’s customers are affluent, tasteful, aspirational, creative, good-looking, successful and everything you want to be. This is where I think the backlash has its roots.

Everyone wants the cream

I visited CES in Las Vegas in January for the first time, and was struck by the fact that seemingly 90% of the exhibitors were selling iPhone accessories. I marvelled at the expectation that one device, representing a single digit fraction of the addressable phone market could attract such a vast ecosystem of accessory manufacturers. I marvelled at the expectation on the part of so many competing companies that this low single digit segment of the market could sustain them all. Try finding a set of travel speakers that is not designed to house an iPod. You can’t.

So much STUFF

The consumer electronics industry is not alone in going crazy over the Apple super demographic. Software developers have, since 2007, built a competitor to the internet based on natively coded software applications. Most of the innovation in the world is coming from iOS developers, meaning those of us who aren’t in the Apple Super-demographic, are locked out. Not only do we have to buy travel speakers that look incomplete, we can’t access the biggest revolution in software development since the internet.
A while ago I jokingly suggested that Apple’s Linkedin company profile should read “manufacturer of online competition prizes”. This was in response to the fact that for the past 10 years, “win an iPod/iPhone” has been the defacto competition prize for every marketing campaign out there. Advertisers are complicit in propagating the Apple super demographic. This has given Apple yet more power to extend its dominance via its iAd advertising platform.

Feeling left out?

Apple is not an inclusive brand – its brand identity is of bearded hipsters hanging out in cafes appreciating good architecture and definitely not downloading any porn ever. Moreover the ubiquity of its single form factor can be a big turn off to anyone who doesn’t identify with these brand values. This creates a ghetto of the excluded, an anti demographic of consumers who have not chosen to paint a big target on their heads so that Apple’s partners can spot them in a crowd.

Until relatively recently, the media seemed fully on board with Apple’s mission, like a helpful servant. When the original iPhone was released, little was made of the extensive missing features (3G Being a major one), even the iPad got a pretty easy ride given its lack of features and functionality & huge price tag when compared to a Netbook. Yet the iPhone 4 has shipped with a really very minor design flaw (and it is a design flaw!), and yet the over-reaction from the media has been staggering.
Return rates for the device have been negligible, showing that there really isn’t a big real world problem with the phone, but you wouldn’t know this from reading the press coverage. This is the downside of being an exclusive club, perhaps the media have finally realised that most of their audience neither own nor want an iPhone. Most people who haven’t already bought into the Apple super demographic, aren’t going to, and they specifically aren’t going to because they find the set of ideologies they must adopt in order to join that club are, frankly, nauseating.

Painting Apple’s customers as a smug elite is just another way of presenting the idea of the super demographic – except that this time the qualities of affluence and good taste are paired with meanness and narcissism, the cut throat careerists, the new yuppies indeed.

At least the antenna works

Free Music

Last week something cool happened. I found myself at the intersection of the phrase ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’, and reality. Minding my own business walking through Clapham North Art Centre to the unit where I work, I came across 5 boxes of records and CDs and big sign saying “Free Music”

Tum te tum ... WHAT!?

Wow! There were around 3 other people there but all of them scoping out the CD boxes – this vinyl treasure trove was untouched! I set about rifling through the records, sweaty palms trembling at the thought of what I might find. Within a minute I’d pulled out some great records – a rare Talking Heads album, a rare PiL 12″, a Section 25 12″ and a few Orbital records (including Satan Live), all in absolutely pristine condition.

Free? Really?

At this point I was reminded of the scene from Nick Horby’s High Fidelity where Rob fights a losing battle with his conscience over whether to take advantage of a jilted lover’s desire for revenge by selling her former husband’s record collection at a fraction of its worth.

I wondered where these records had come from, why they were free I had a palpable sense of guilt at taking music off the street for nothing. I felt that Surely someone was owed something somewhere? Maybe a business had gone under and the administrators had no desire to set up a cool second hand vinyl outlet and so were just throwing all this magical loot out? If that was the case, was I no better than grave robber?

I somehow managed to override the sense of guilt, and I left with a modest selection of records and returned to my desk. About an hour later I came out again, only to see that almost all of the CDs had been scavenged, but to my astonishment, the other record box (that had previously contained some CDs and so I couldn’t get to it past the throng) contained a full set of records.

One of the first things I saw upon inspecting the box was a signed Pet Shop Boys record. What, I asked myself not unreasonably, is wrong with the world when people don’t even want to scavenge a signed, original pressing Pet Shop Boys LP. It’s from the 80s! It’s SIGNED!

Unwanted - not by me!

I don’t even like the Pet Shop Boys, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a signed original pressing get ruined by the rain, just because no one else around here appreciates the value of this type of thing!

It was about now that I began to realise that the line between grave robber and archaeologist is rather fluid… I was performing a valuable service – preserving these treasures for future generations.

All of this made me contrast my joy, excitement and anticipation at acquiring so much cool new property, with the humdrum convenience of making a new Spotify playlist available offline.

I doubt, even if it were technically possible, that having DJ Danger Mouse personally sign my locally stored copy of his MP3 would enhance my pleasure at having his music available to me. I also realise that blogging about the addictive pleasures of vinyl is not exactly breaking new ground in the internets. But if I want anything from this public forum it’s to communicate my freshly resolved belief the absolutely ultimate way to consume music is to own vinyl rent digital. Someone print that on a T-Shirt please?

Some Thoughts From The Open Mobile Summit London 2010

Pondering 2 days of intense focus on the state of the mobile industry at the www.openmobilesummit.com – gave me some great insights to the future direction of the web, and the ambitions of those leading its development. This post is just to note down a few of those thoughts.

Firstly web 2.0 is not universally viewed as being a Good Thing, as anyone who has tried to manage their Facebook privacy settings in recent weeks will attest, on the one hand you have a powerful personal PR tool, and on the other, you have the world’s largest and most up to date marketing database.

Todays web – web 2.0 – has been built on assumptions of future ad revenue, and so there is a tension between maintaining the privacy of its user base and leveraging their preferences and interests to make money from advertisers. How do you monetise user generated content without stepping on user’s toes? It’s tricky – one strategy seems to be to make huge user privacy land grabs, and then retreat as little as you need to in the backlash. This is a strategy employed by both Google and Facebook in recent weeks/moths, and something we’re bound to see more of.

Day 2 Keynotes at the Open Mobile Summit

So there’s the tension between user and service provider, there’s a similar tension between traditional content owners and web companies, and once again it surrounds the monetisation of content. One model, is to shift away from ownership of digital content (I’ve always felt as though ownership of a file is an abstract concept given that it can’t exist in physical space). Spotify’s subscription model allows unlimited access to a huge back catalogue of music on a rental basis, thus leaving vinyl snobs like me free to spend our cash on beautiful, physical renderings of audio, and access to digital content as and when we please.

Spotify’s Head of Mobile, Gustav Soderstrom spoke at the Open Mobile Summit, and pointed out how for years people had no problem with the rental model when applied to the movie industry. Moreover, when you have no barrier for entry in regard to trying new music, you try new music. Thus Spotify is changing the way its subscribers listen to music in a very profound way – but it’s reliant on consumers choosing to change their behaviour from paying to own digital music and paying to access it.

Another controversial area is in the realm of digital publishing. Currently apps for the European market may get written in English French and German. It’s not an economic viability for a programmer to code 6-8 different versions of her app for all the various platforms, and then code 30-40 different language versions for each culture. The current reality is that she’ll code for 2-3 platforms (Apple, Android, Symbian/Blackberry), and maybe 3 languages (English German, French/Spanish). So our brave Web 2.0 mobile revolution becomes a tool for the homogenisation of culture. Suddenly we’re McWeb 2.0, that’s not what I signed up for!

Apps are a fascinating recent cultural phenomena, I’ve come to view this as being part of a digitisation of personality which the web 2.0 movement has facilitated. In fact this metaphor extends further to cover some of the ideological underpinnings behind the platforms themselves with Apple’s following reaching religious fervour at each WWDC it’s not hard to see Cupertino as a cathedral for the teachings of the ideologies of Steve Jobs. Or God as I’m sure he’d prefer us to call him. This compares with the reformation style schism of the Google Android platform, deviating from the Jobsian control freakery and opening the platform and apps ecosystem.

The iPad - a £500 photo frame?

In the open model the web is at the core with apps having a role as different use cases dictate. In the closed model, the apps replace the web altogether – the browser is just another app.

The final big question of the conference was “Will the web win?” as in, will open web standards prevail over the closed ecosystems of Apple/Rim/Microsoft. At the moment there’s no doubt that Apple is winning hands down, the one really recurring theme throughout the two days was the iPad, it’s potential, its impact, its relevance, its form factor, its customers. But the point was made time and again that the web is the best platform when it comes to avoiding issues of homogenising cultures, and providing users with a consistent, open experience across hardware.

Walled gardens can provide a wonderful experience, but as long as you know there’s a world out there you can’t access, they are prisons. So in this analogy, the job of the web is to ensure the world outside survives.

Sympathy for the Record Industry: UPDATE!

Neat summary of some of the issues I discussed in my last blog post by seaninsound (editor of DiS )

http://seaninsound.tumblr.com/post/616170685/music-biz

Sympathy for the Record Industry

The most hypocritical argument deployed by the major record labels in their campaign to turn back the tide of change is the artists deserve to be paid for their work line.  It’s such an obvious truism, and utterly beyond dispute, rather like saying “Kittens deserve to be fed”, yet coming from an industry that has for decades ripped off audiences and feasted on the lunch created by musicians it’s nothing short of contemptible.

Traditionally the major labels have had control of both ends of the supply demand process; the only music most people hear is the music promoted by major labels on commercial tv/radio.  To get anything different you have to go out of your way to find it.  As an artist, in order to be fed into the supply part of the machine, you’d have to sign away ownership of your music, agree to be paid in debt, on the vague basis that you’ll be credited fractional amounts of record sales against the debt until you are dropped, penniless and crushed (99.9% of cases) or somehow make back the advance and start making money.

This process is described in a far more eloquent and detailed way by Steve Albini in his essay titled The Problem With Music.  I suggest you go and read it.  NOW.

The status quo as it was when Albini wrote was (and still is) a depressing reality faced by thousands of aspiring musicians.  Yet each time I hear a record industry exec, or vested interest insider rent-a-tit like Lilly Allen spouting off about how there’s no incentive for bands to make music if their music is just going to get stolen via piracy, I get cross.  The record industry knows intimately that if bands formed and made great records according to the financialremuneration on offer, there would be no music industry.  The Velvet Underground didn’t make records to get rich, they made them to get awesome.

Michael Azzerard’s excellent Our Band Could be your Life sums up what can happen when bands look outside the traditional artist-label-audience relationship and create their own networks of distribution and performance.  The burgeoning music scene Azzerard documents was founded on the home taping phenomenon – another technology that for a time purportedly threatened the establishment.

The case study of the 1980’s US underground scene shows that artists don’t have to get paid to make incredible music.  Who wouldn’t want to spend their early 20s making cutting edge experimental music and touring the world in the back of a van with their 3 best friends on a diet of booze, drugs and female adulation?  This is summed up well by TheRamones

This is a fact record companies know only too well – they offer bands a bigger van, some up front pocket change and access to a flashier studio, in exchange for legal ownership of everything the band will ever record, and all future sales, save for a miniscule royalty.  The economics of signing a contract with a major label have been questionable ever since the inception of indie labels like Sub Pop who provide much more favourable terms to artists long-term.  It’s only since the digital revolution that it’s become increasingly clear that major labels are really no longer good for anything.  EvenMacca’s gone to an indie.

For the labels to hold up their ever diminishing rosters as a reason for us to supposedly care about digital piracy is hypocritical to the point of absurdity. If they cared about their artists, why have they spent so much energy creating increasingly elaborate schemes and dubious accounting measures to avoid enriching any of them?

The digital bogeyman appears in all manner of guises now, even innovations like Spotify – owned in part by the record labels, and unquestionably generating new revenue for the industry – is attracting criticism from the establishment.  The reason why, is that the threat to labels isn’t the bedroom pirates, it’s the start-ups, the entrepreneurs, people who are in tune with both bands and audiences and who can see a way to use digital formats and distribution to better connect the two than could ever have been offered by the old system.

Digital music has created enough disruption to the music industry to actually challenge and democratise the process of supply and demand.  We don’t have to be force-fed music via radio playlists and multimillion dollar ad campaigns.  Whatever money really is leaking out of the business due to piracy will not prevent great records being made, because no great record was ever made for money.  The only thing we have to fear from the demise of the major label hit machine, is our artists having one less thing to rage against.