This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
Above Image: credited to songquan deng - shutterstock.com


hundred years of lawyers and men in suits, the arrow to its heart made up of long strings of noughts and ones. But if time has revealed the nakedness of the major labels’ emperors, the digerati aren’t going to fix the problem. Not on the evidence of that New York conference, anyway; nor by the latest ‘innovations’.


Take Spotify. we’re told.


at $3.5bn pre-money, allegedly.


It’ll save music, so It’s raising investment It’s


transformational, apparently. Let’s just think about their model for a minute. You can listen to as much music as you want, free, but interrupted by adverts. (Yes, that’s revolutionary: it’s called ‘Commercial Radio’. It’s been around for


sixty years). But wait, there’s


more: if you pay them enough money, they’ll take away the thing that’s been deliberately put there to annoy you. This is the business equivalent of a backstreet kid offering to ‘look after your car’ - pay up or else. I can think of better ways to build brand loyalty.


What brilliant business model underpins


this? One in which Spotify pays more and more cash to major labels, the bigger it gets. “Dear Investor: please put money into my business, which is a hugely risky machine for giving money away to the Labels, who have us over a barrel and could destroy us at a stroke”. The future of the music industry? I don’t think so.


Take iTunes. It’s a record shop. Yes, it’s a sleek, online one, honed by Sir Jonathan, burnished by The Legend of Steve - but it’s still just a record shop. There’s nothing radical there, nothing disruptive. Labels still get the cash (the bit Apple deigns to leave them, anyway); musicians still get ripped off, just as they have been since the music industry began. Buy a 79p download on iTunes, and the musician will get 8p - if they’re lucky. And only if they’re already known, with marketing muscle promoting them to the front pages. Nobody new and original will ever be discovered on iTunes.


As you survey the allegedly hot new music businesses, a similar pattern


emerges. There are reams of US


venture-backed businesses, mostly applying new technology to the old, failing music industry model.


That


will never work, because the model is broken.


As it crumbled, and risk


became as rare as an A&R man with an expense account, record labels became antique dealers, taking refuge in the back catalogue. “Our release strategy for next year? How about the Eagles?” As part of the same panicked reaction, the labels shy away from the new unless it’s sufficiently bland and safe, preferably mediated by Cowell, the down-dumber, a man so expert in music he thinks a Major Seventh is a rank in the US Military.


This is no problem if you think the world has heard enough new music and consumers will be content to listen repeatedly to Phil Collins and U2 until the ice caps melt and our iPhones rust. If, however, you believe the appetite for the new might be as endemic in the human spirit as the passion to create, something different is required.


45 entrepreneurcountry


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60