Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century

From the Washington Post:

Doris Lessing pulled up in a black cab where a media horde was waiting Thursday in front of her leafy north London home. Reporters opened the door and told her she had won the Nobel Prize for literature, to which she responded: “Oh Christ! … I couldn’t care less.”

She continues:

“I can’t say I’m overwhelmed with surprise,” Lessing said. “I’m 88 years old and they can’t give the Nobel to someone who’s dead, so I think they were probably thinking they’d probably better give it to me now before I’ve popped off.”

Well-known Smart Guy™ and head of Universal Music Doug Morris is apparently marshaling the troops (aka, other music labels) to defeat the evil iTunes. Is he advocating an expansion of the consumer-friendly trend towards DRM-free music? Nope. He’s trying to put together a new music store that offers subscription-based access to music that will not play on iPods.

This will fail for the following reasons:

1. It’s subscription based.
2. It won’t work with iPods.

No subscription model has worked yet in the music space (see Sony, Napster, and Microsoft’s attempts) and the iPod has a 70%+ share of the MP3 player market. So, failed business model plus incompatibility with everyone’s player equals…success? I guess it does to Doug Morris.

In the article I linked to above, Doug is quoted as saying (in reference to his original deal with Apple to place Universal’s content on the iTMS), “We got rolled like a bunch of puppies.” His definition of “rolled” is that he only gets 70% of the revenue each song generates, even though Universal has zero distribution costs. Personally, if getting 70% of anything involving the sale of over 3 billion things makes me a puppy, I’d be happy to chew a few slippers and get my tummy scratched.

More examples of the point made in the preceding post:

• Oasis and Jamiroquai will both follow Radiohead’s example and sell direct digital downloads at whatever price listeners are willing to pay.
• Madonna is apparently ditching Warner Bros. and moving into a ten year deal with a concert promoter to distribute her music and market her brand – a concert promoter with no vested interest in preserving the status quo. (BTW, Madonna will be in her 60s when this deal expires.)

Basically, the acts at the top and bottom of the music pyramid are moving in directions where traditional record labels (and traditional distribution models and media formats) have no role. Ten years ago – before the web permeated our lives, before the iPod, and before near-ubiquitous access to broadband – this would have been inconceivable.

Today, Radiohead released their much-anticipated seventh album, In Rainbows. As has been reported everywhere, they are selling it directly to listeners via web download and you, the purchaser, get to choose how much you pay for it (even if you want to pay nothing – I paid £5). What music label would allow such a thing? None. Radiohead doesn’t have a label. Prince, who’s also had his issues with record labels, took a similarly revolutionary path recently when he gave away for free millions of his latest CD in the UK and then proceeded to sell out 21 dates in London. Trent Reznor announced two days ago that Nine Inch Nails is free from a record label obligation and is looking for a “direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate”.

Apple and Amazon selling DRM-free music while huge acts like Radiohead, Prince, and Nine Inch Nails sell unencumbered tracks directly to the public? The Media Sphincter (that clenching muscle of media companies who continue to restrict media from being freely created and sold to audiences who crave more and more of it, even in the face of epic changes that will eventually remake their business model whether they like it or not) is beginning to fail. Watch out below.

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