Brian:

While there is no doubt that the music industry is having difficulty adjusting to the computer age, I find Michael Laskow's model worthy of closer scrutiny. I've included my comments in parentheses along with a final comment at the end.

Q: How does it work?
A: Subscription music services that offer all music by all artists in every genre as streamed content will proliferate. Consumers will no longer need to own CDs or download MP3s and burn CDs because they'll have any song they want, any time they want it, wherever they are -- via cell phone with headphones while jogging, satellite radio in their cars, and by landlines when they're home or in a hotel room in Singapore.
Music lovers will design their own playlists -- kind of like personalized radio stations, or they might choose to use pre-programmed, 'canned' lists. Record companies will no longer need to spend a fortune to find talent, and manufacture, market or distribute the CDs. (Hmm? If not the record companies, who might that be, Michael?)

Q: Why not?
A: Because millions of people will automatically hear the new song when it debuts on the 'New Country' playlist. (Who creates that playlist, Michael?) They'll hit the 'Add' button if they love it, and want to add it to their list, and the 'Delete' button if they don't.

Q: If you don't have record companies, how does the new talent get discovered?
A: We'll still have record labels, but they won't need to find talent the same way they do now. The artists will come to companies like TAXI to get a 'J.D. Power' stamp of approval -- of sorts. (So now, rather than record company mass marketing and artist development, and countless producers, song pluggers, artists et al, we will have Michael et al determining what is available. Sounds like the conflict of interest model to me.)
The music providers will add them to their 'jukeboxes' if they meet a minimum standard. (Minimum standard? According to whom? Let me guess, Michael et al?) That will allow artists who can't currently get signed a chance to find their audience and earn a living. That's not possible now because there are limited resources at the labels, limited slots on radio playlists, and a limited number of stations. The cost of CDs also prevents consumers from enjoying as many artists as they'd probably like. Their resources are limited as well.
In my model, labels could simply track the most popular songs (popular according to whom?) and contact those artists to see if they'd like to kick it up a notch using the labels as investment bankers for tour support and other forms of marketing to boost the number of spins they get per month. Instead of the artist getting a piece of the label's action, the tables would be turned. The labels would buy into the artists' income.

Taxi performs a valuable service to both writers, artists and the industry, but I for one, do not want Michael or any other "experts" giving stamps of approval or creating minimum standards in the music industry.

There are no simple fixes in our industry and there are no models to follow that don't have as many flaws as the systems they were designed to replace.

Consider the Copyright Act of 1905, for example. The "intent" of the compulsory license provision was to prevent a few powerful music publishers from signing all the good writers - as if that would ever happen - and thus form a music monopoly. In reality, what it did do was allow the powerful publishers and record companies to cover anybody, anytime and just pay a license fee for doing so. Many aspiring artists had their careers undermined by major artists covering their material once it hit the airwaves. So much for good intentions...

P.E. Knudsen



[This message has been edited by Knute (edited 03-04-2004).]

P.E. Knudsen