on 13 February 2009To Cannes for the Midem 2009 music business conference. Oh all right, we didn’t actually go. Apple’s San Francisco keynote used up our January budget, although with hindsight it wasn’t very good value as a source of relevant news. We’ve already booked next year’s trip to the opening of a whelk stall in Yamsk.
Anyway, through the marvel of blogging we were nonetheless able to experience, without paying 15 quid for a beer, the MidemNet debate between record companies and Internet service providers – two industries locked together in a drunken stagger, half fighting, half embracing, while the rest of the world tuts disinterestedly.
Unlike Macworld Expo, this event did produce at least one unexpected announcement, when Isle of Man minister Ron Berry revealed plans for a blanket licence on the electronic distribution of recorded music. Instead of prohibiting citizens from sharing tracks without paying, his government wants to charge them a fixed fee, via ISPs, and hand it to the music industry, then leave everyone alone to do whatever they like with MP3s.
Of course, the Isle of Man has long been noted for its forward-looking policies. Homosexuality was legalised as long ago as 1994, a year after capital punishment was abolished, and not since 1976 have young offenders been stripped naked and beaten with sticks. Today, only 95% of Manx women requiring abortions have to travel to the UK to get around local restrictions. Taxes have been reduced to zero for those least able to pay – companies and foreign millionaires – while poverty is unknown. Literally unknown, because the government chooses not to maintain accurate figures. It’s a kind of progressive paradise.
No surprise, then, that the Crown Dependency would come up with the simplest and best solution to the problem of music licensing. Or the worst and most complicated, depending on whose reaction you listened to. Also on the platform was Geoff Taylor, head of the BPI, the music industry’s military wing. His opinion is always significant because he’s always wrong. If there are two ways of proceeding on any issue, and one of them is guaranteed to ensure fewer people get to hear less music on a smaller number of the devices they own while risking more draconian penalties for a more imaginative variety of putative infringements, Geoff’s pursuit of that one will invariably make a rat’s progress up a drainpipe look positively ginger.
This time, though, Geoff’s contrary runes were impossible to read. First he blew hot, saying that if all ISPs signed up for a scheme like Berry’s ‘we’d be in an enormously better position’. His only reservation was that ‘our doors are not being battered down by ISPs looking for licences’. Maybe that’s because – as fellow panellist Peter Jenner, of The International Music Managers’ Forum, pointed out – the industry has never shown any inclination to offer simple blanket licences to ISPs or anyone else. That’s why it took so long for legal download services to emerge and why, when they did, the record companies found they’d lost the initiative in price-setting to the likes of Apple. Duh.
Then, after a few other interested parties had weighed in and Jenner had entertainingly described the record business as ‘in the fucking dumper’, Geoff blew cold. ‘Nationalising the music industry on the Internet is not the way,’ he concluded. Which was odd, because that seemed to be exactly the proposal he’d just welcomed. So who was right, Geoff or Geoff? And more importantly, who was wrong?
It turned out to be Jenner. ‘We have to move away from the idea of licence, and towards the idea of compensation,’ he insisted, appearing to advocate the end of music sales in favour of a system in which anyone could legally acquire any track at any time by whatever route they felt like, while some kind of ISP-funded quango would magically detect what was being downloaded and pay the record companies accordingly. There was little mention of musicians and their rights, whether to control the distribution of their work or get paid for it – perhaps because none were on the bill, except Feargal Sharkey, who’s long since reinvented himself as a bureaucrat. Sharkey rounded off the debate by telling the platform: ‘80% of what we’re all saying is the same damn thing.’ Yes, they were all saying that whatever the other bloke had just said was an unworkable crock.
It might sound ideal to create a system that rewards music production while allowing users to acquire tracks freely, but in practice it would surely be a nightmare. With no revenue model for independent, competitive outlets like the iTunes Store, we’d all be left trawling BitTorrent for our music – or relying on our ISPs, and however fashionable it may be to suggest otherwise, ISPs are supposed to do connection, not content. Whatever Geoff thinks, the compensation model of total disintermediation can’t be the answer. We’ll just have to wait for a proposal he definitely hates.
Adam Banks got his teenage kicks from an Amstrad tape-to-tape machine.
adambanksdotcom Google Instant seems like the search equivalent of the Interrupting Cow knock-knock joke