Music Industry? What industry?

[Peter Korsten]

Op 16-9-2013 14:59, Jay Vaughan schreef:

> http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthetics-punk-rock-is-now-enforced-by-law/
>
> What thinks the -bar?

The guy makes a good case. He should be a politician.

It's probably a more generic problem. You simply cannot be doing the 
things you did yesterday, and expect everything to remain the same. The 
world around us is in constant flux, and if you don't adapt (which is a 
constant process), you'll soon encounter the effects of Mr Darwin's 
little theory.

At work, we're now off-shoring quite a bit of development work to India 
(still part of the same multinational, BTW, so technically speaking 
they're our colleagues and not our suppliers, although from a commercial 
point of view they're more like the latter). These guys actually do a 
pretty good job, and I'm difficult to please when it comes to code quality.

As a result, my job has changed as well. If I didn't adapt to that, 
well, I'd better go and polish up my CV.

When it comes to music, it used to be quite elitist. There were the big 
names, plus a whole load of wannabees that you'd never hear of. That 
business model didn't work too well either for the record companies, 
because the wannabees cost more money than they yielded, and this would 
have to be compensated by the big names.

Nowadays, every man and his dog can be a wannabee and buy professional 
grade equipment for a laughably low amount of money, which in a sense 
should be brilliant for the record companies: they could just drop all 
aspiring, starving artists and try and find the Next Big Thing. Ergo, 
you see X Factor, American Idol, Britain's Got Talent, and we're treated 
to One Direction.

As an aside, I'm quite sure that right now, some people are doing some 
fundamental research into search engines that scour YouTube and 
SoundCloud, and throw some mathematical analysis at the music to try and 
find that Next Big Thing. After all, they're relaying fibre optic cables 
to be able to buy stocks a fraction of a second quicker, so with all 
these billions at stake, there's bound to be someone doing this.

But the big, nay, huge mistake that the record companies made was 
resisting the change. A lot of lobbying got them legislation like the 
DMCA, but it's like legislating against a tidal wave. Things have changed.

I'm 100% sure that the whole music business will keep evolving. Maybe 
there's now a sort of musical version of communism at work, but that 
won't last either. How will it evolve? Not a clue.

- Peter