Fool's Gold

Please help me do onto others as I would do onto myself: make money, share money, discover and listen to great music and dig into amazing entertainment, and have fun.

Sometimes I think that if we knew how hard it is to do the right thing we wouldn’t bother! Every day I talk to someone, an artist, a content producer, a content distributor, some intermediary or another. And what I have learned is that it absolutely doesn’t pay to be honest! What pays is to be a brigand, a pirate, a thief, a greedy bastard. But I grew up in the 60s and I just cannot accept that all of that effort and belief was for NOTHING!

I am trying to find a reason for this damn battle with those who seem absolutely committed to hari kari, the Jim Jones kind of mass suicide. I’m talking about the music industry, and maybe some of those in the film and television industry. And then there are the social networks don’t even try to make any money, and the money they make is not for sharing! It is pure stupidity coupled with pure greed, stupidity dressed up in idealism and “isn’t this a great service to users?” Like last.fm and Pandora and Myspace and Youtube. I promise I won’t go on any more about them, but will someone please tell me how anyone other than the founders benefited? This current model is sickening! My battle has been with those who would benefit from a sustainable model where a great service for customers, makes money for the suppliers of the music and film and allows the intermediary, who create something merits  a little margin to the intermediary, to help transport the service to those who wouldn’t ordinarily find it. A good clean business model where everyone wins: consumer, creator, supplier, distributor… all of the parties in our co-created world.

So, why my frustration? Well, I think I am coming to my senses. I thought that if we did it (launched a digital entertainment site) with these noble and practical values in mind, where everyone gains and we all share (kindergarten propaganda based on centuries of human and animal interaction) that we would eventually find a way. But NO, we have been “negotiating” with large and not so large record labels and film and video distribution companies for a year and a half, trying to convince them that we will honor their copyrights and their artists, and their blood sweat and tears, from our first day live, but can only do so if they GIVE US A CHANCE TO MAKE A LITTLE MONEY TOO (we are not living in communism after all, there is no state paying us simply to exist).

We think we have created the best revenue engine online ever created. But somehow, after hundreds of thousands of dollars later, and wasted hours of mine and our lawyer’s time arguing and negotiating, we still do not have all of the content we want, all of the partnerships we have been working toward. Many of them want us to pay them millions of dollars in advance payments for the right to sell their already-available-for-free music or film! Gone are the days of lots of little corner stores sell music and videos with passion. It shouldn’t cost upwards of $20 million to simply have the rights to sell music online, not to mention another $20 million in advance payments to music and media cartels, just for the privilege of having digital inventory did not require a fleet of trucks to deliver. We live in a digital world where content gets sent through the ether and costs virtually nothing.

Give me a break! Some labels and film studios who want digital service providers to pay outrageous sums for the privilege of selling content that would otherwise be stolen (or shared, depending on your point of view) are not unlike pimps that sell their girls on the streets, and have no regard for the value of the underlying human, their heart and soul and their individual manner of communication. But I have new hope

Can we survive creating a legitimate, legal service that respects creative content? Do we need to have a service that offers major label content along side independent music, for sale even when we cannot make money on selling mp3s because the margins are too low and the music is available for free anyway? Do we live in a world that we have to become like a communist state and pay so much for content that we will be bankrupt, before we have actually sold anything, in an environment when no one is paying for it anyway, in order to not be sent to Siberia?

This summer was the winter of my discontent. I’m angry. We are trying to create a sustainable business model where we generate enough revenue to share it with our partners, artists, labels, consumers, advertisers (they pay our bills), distributors, publishing rights associations… and still manage to stay afloat. We don’t want to create another shell game, house of cards so easily blown away by delusions of grandeur, greed, a dot.com bomb. But, the only winners so far are the founders of companies that pirate music, that don’t pay artists or labels, that siphon money from the venture capitalist and give it to the label, disintermediating and bypassing the artist and creator and CONSUMER, hoping for some big float on a stock exchange or acquisition by the big machine, the companies that have lost all sense of reason and hope to build share price value by buying companies that have big image if no revenues.

What business in the history of the world, except that which we refer to as slavery, can survive by giving 50 – 100% of its income to only 4 of the suppliers in a supply chain consisting of hundreds and thousands (labels)? That is our competition. I have heard that Myspace music gave 50% of the its new company to the 4 major labels as a kind of penance for having earned whatever they earned from the rape and pillage of artists (promotion, read corporate piracy and ‘copyright infringement’) in their first few years of being in ‘business’. Apple (iTunes), where they have earned in the same way, selling iPods where users put their ‘illegally gained’ content, music downloaded from free p2p sites (corporate endorsed piracy) only to disguise these ill-gotten gains behind a ‘store’ where profit margins are less than zero. Here is the multi-million dollar question: Can we cultivate and celebrate independent music without giving everything to a few monolithic suppliers? Can we manage to launch with great independent music and show them that we the consumer, the artist, the independent label, are able to live and thrive in the real world, the summer of possibilities?

Please help me do onto others as I would do onto myself: make money, share money, discover and listen to great music and dig into amazing entertainment, and have fun.

Posted at 02:48AM Oct 17, 2008 by shelley in Music  |  Comments[0]