Can't Win For Losing

Perhaps  you’ve heard of OK Go? More likely, you’ve seen their music video. Y’know the one of them jamming while moving on four treadmills with the catchy song? Or at least you saw it before EMI decided that they didn’t want their intellectual property(IP) all over the place without them being able to cash in on it. Which is what lead singer for OK Go wrote about in an op-ed piece in the New York Times over the weekend.

A long time ago, when the internet was young and full of promise, YouTube wasn’t owned by Google and music videos were freely embeddable. Things change though. Now music companies have decided that they’d rather make it so you can only view videos on YouTubes site (where they get a share for every view) then get the free publicity of letting people share their videos however, whenever they want. If that’s what they’ve decided is a better business move, more power to them. However it belies a deep misunderstanding of how the Internet works and where the power of this massive information network lies. The Internet makes information absurdly cheap – to the point where it’s ridiculous to charge for it in most instances because if you do someone, somewhere will find  a way to make it free just to spite you. Trying to corral it doesn’t really work, making it illegal doesn’t really work and trying to hardwire restrictions doesn’t work either – one thing these companies should learn is to never underestimate the resourcefulness and spite of nerdy young men (and women too).

Yet they persist in doing so. Why? Because they have positioned themselves as the Great Gatekeepers of Culture. They possess the rights to your favorite bands, TV shows and movies and therefore you must pay their toll to access their property. Increasingly though this model doesn’t work. The nature of the Internet allows bands to do it themselves – they can do reasonably well selling their music themselves, designing their own website (allowing them to sell their own merchandise as well) and organizing their own concerts. It gives them direct access to their customers and doesn’t require a middleman. Which is, let’s face it, what a lot of these companies are.

So as less and less talent finds the deals offered to them by music companies more and more distasteful, the music companies find themselves putting a stranglehold on what they do have. Which just reinforces the cycle. I figure they’ll learn and adapt eventually, but only when they’re faced with just how untenable their position is. Vision and innovation, it seems, rarely come from established forces.