Paul McGuinness on the future of the music industry
Paul McGuinness has been giving his two cents on the future of the music industry and the problems with illegal downloading in an extraordinary article in GQ Magazine. He moans about the negative impact of file-sharing on artists income, how anonymous bloggers attack him any time he raises these issues, and how the concept of “free” has caused irreparable harm to the music industry. Here’s a flavour:
My message was quite simple – and remains so today. We are living in an era when “free” is decimating the music industry and is starting to do the same to film, TV and books. Yet for the world’s internet service providers, bloated by years of broadband growth, “free music” has become a multi-billion dollar bonanza. What has gone so wrong? And what can be done now to put it to right?
Or how about this:
Well-known artists very seldom speak out on piracy. There are several reasons for this. It isn’t seen as cool or attractive to their fans – Lars Ulrich from Metallica was savaged when he criticised Napster. Other famous artists sometimes understandably feel too rich and too successful to be able to speak out on the issue without being embarrassed.
Then there is the backlash from the bloggers – those anonymous gremlins who wait to send off their next salvo of bilious four-letter abuse whenever a well-known artist sticks their head above the parapet. When Lily Allen recently posted some thoughtful comments about how illegal file-sharing is hurting new developing acts, she was ravaged by the online mob and withdrew from the debate.
Anonymous gremlins eh? And do please spare a thought for those poor, starving, internationally successful artists who are being abused by hoards of smart-arsed bloggers.
While I do agree completely that artists and composers need to be paid for their work (my livelihood depends after all on working for composers), some of his points are so out of step with the current realities they actually border on the comical.
The simple fact is that these changes have already taken place and there’s no way that he or any other powerful figure in the music business can turn back the clock and return to how things were before the Internet began to challenge the music industry.
He clearly misunderstands the disruptive technology of the Internet and fails to see how it can largely be a positive force for good. Never before have artists and composers had so many opportunities to reach and engage with audiences and develop a demand for their work. The Internet has created a mass of niches according to Jeff Jarvis in his excellent book, What Would Google Do? This is especially relevant to music as the Internet is helping bring about a fragmentation within all genres of music. It is unlikely that we will ever see a band as big or commercially successful as U2 as the mass market breaks into a patchwork of smaller niches. This is a positive development for music as it creates more opportunities for artists to produce, share and distribute their music, and in turn develop audiences using the online tools available to them without the layers of middlemen that the old ways of the record companies created. Andrew Dubber eloquently makes this point in his post on the topic.
To be fair to McGuinness he does paint a positive picture for music in the future. He praises the subscription model of services such as Spotify where consumers pay a monthly fee for unmetered access to music and sees this as a potential solution. Whether or not more users will pay €10 per month to access this and similar services remains to be seen.
However, it’s the last paragraph that leaves me scratching my head:
If the engineers who built the iPhone, the geniuses who made Google reach every home in the world in less than a decade and the amazing talents behind Facebook were to apply themselves to our problems and help, what a wonderful world it would be. Great work being made, distributed efficiently and everyone in the value chain being fairly paid.
To expect technologists to solve the problems of the music industry is a ludicrous argument to make. It’s up to any industry collectively to solve it’s own problems and work with the new realities of the Internet to make a future business.
When I read this, I’m reminded of Rupert Murdock and how he views tablet devices such as the iPad as helping to save the newspaper industry (who wants to bet if they will). The music industry needs to be smarter than this and accept the new realities and stop wishing for a return to how things used to be. We’ve moved on so deal with it and stop whinging.
