Tim Quirk on Music Labels

"I asked Tim Quirk, songwriter and musician for the pop group Wonderlick who is known best as a member of Too Much Joy, about the future of the music business in the age of P2P downloads, etc. He gave some lively and insightful answers....

'I think what p2p has done is destroy a lot of the value of the catalog they'd amassed previously, so now they're not going to be able to re-sell us our record collections a third, fourth and fifth time. But digital distribution in general could as easily have saved the labels as killed them -- on the one hand it's much cheaper to produce a high-quality recording, and should be much cheaper to manufacture and/or distribute that to the public, so margins should have gotten better, while the fact that any schmoe can now make his own record, as I said above, should make the majors' marketing muscle that much more valuable. But there are so many parties with a stake in the status quo -- producers, studio owners, managers, publishers -- that the business was fatally slow to adapt to the new reality. We tried to build a subscription service in 2000, but it was impossible to get licenses. And there was definitely a point where Napster could have charged people $5/month to use the service and the music business would have grown as a result. I'm convinced of that. I'm also convinced there's still time -- if Rhapsody or Emusic or whatever service could offer folks everything rather than just that subset we manage to negotiate licenses for, and let them download at will rather than pay .99 a track and/or accept some kind of drm with the file, people would sign up in droves, they'd discover more new music than is possible on unlicensed p2p services, and they'd pay for the privilege....

Even worse, they stop printing records once they fall below a certain sales threshold, and that threshold keeps getting raised. But then they often refuse to license those out of print recordings to other folks. This is the situation I'm in. Indie labels have approached Giant/WB about getting the out of print TMJ records, but Warner won't even talk to them unless they're willing to pony up a $50,000 advance -- which is more than one of those records would likely gross if it *were* re-released. The corporate reasoning as its been explained to me is that it's not worth the paperwork if it won't make at least that much money. (This reasoning usually comes with several helpings of complete and utter disdain that you would even waste their time asking if your records are so worthless.) But will they give me back my supposedly worthless copyrights? Nope. Because it's a corporate asset, and who knows if somebody will want to use a track on a movie soundtrack one day.

Still more infuriatingly, they won't even license the out of print titles to services like Rhapsody, because they're only doing the paperwork for records that are currently in print. Does that make sense? Of course not, and a lot of folks at the labels realize this. Unfortunately, they're not in the departments that are currently responsible for clearing digital rights. This is the kind of stupid corporate bureaucracy that the majors have saddled themselves with....

I don't know that it's wise to generalize from the few young people I've encountered, but what the hey. I defnitely think they don't fetishize physical objects the way my generation does (hell, I still mourn the loss of 12" lp covers, cuz the art was so much better). I know young folks who download more than they could ever listen to, which seems like some weird kind of hoarding behavior to me.

But the thing you can always count on about young people is that they turn into old people. Eventually, they have more money than time, and that's when you can sell them music as a service rather than music as a product. The biggest effect I think they'll have isn't so much their demand that music be free, but their demand that you offer them access to EVERYTHING. And as a guy who grew up lamenting the fact that radio always played the same damn groups over and over again, I love them for that.' " [Siva Vaidhyanathan's Weblog, via FurdLog: A Digital Intellectual Property Weblog]

That's the point I'm at - convenience. Cris and I were just talking this morning about downloading music and I noted how I'd pay per download if a site would just offer a service that lets me own what I buy, make mixes, and take the files with me on a portable player. It's been more than a year now since I basically stopped buying CDs, and I'm still waiting for the music service that wants my money.

I also couldn't resist pointing to this interview because it's Tim Quirk of Too Much Joy!!! Thank heavens I bought the group's CDs when they first came out.

Now that Copyfight is in my aggregator <grin>, I see that yesterday Donna pointed to Derek Slater's interview with MPAA President Jack Valenti. You can read the best parts on his blog A Copyfighter's Musings (which praise-the-lord-and-pass-the-butter has an RSS feed of its own!) or read the whole thing at the Harvard Political Review.

"If the Verizon decision holds up, I expect the MPAA and RIAA to come back after the universities, to really make them monitor their networks. It's already starting to happen at Harvard.

'HPR: The MPAA has backed several bills mandating copy prevention technologies. Critics have lambasted these bills for curbing consumer's 'fair use' rights, including the ability to make back-up copies. How can we balance the interests of consumers and the movie industry?
JV: What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law.'

This kind of caught me off guard. I didn't expect him to completely deny the existence of fair use. I know he's read this. I guess he was just trying to exaggerate, because he quickly contradicts himself:

'Right now, any professor can show a complete movie in his classroom without paying a dime--that's fair use. What is not fair use is making a copy of an encrypted DVD, because once you're able to break the encryption, you've undermined the encryption itself....'

HPR: Why do we need government mandates for copy prevention technologies?
JV: You have to have copy prevention mandated by the government sooner or later because otherwise everybody's not playing by the same ground rules. For example, the standards of my cell phone have to be mandated by the FCC because everybody has to operate off the same standards. Also, all railroad tracks in this country are the same standardized width.
If you don't have tightly focused, narrowly drawn mandates, either regulatory or congressional, then, if I'm a maverick computer maker in Taiwan, I can say, 'Hell, I'm not going to play by the rules. I'm going to do it so everybody can copy." Then Toshiba and Sony and IBM can say, 'Well if he does that, then I want to do it.' We always operate on the fact that everybody needs to know that there's a 55 mph speed limit. That's called a standard.' "

I'm sure our Canadian friends and others outside the U.S. will be thrilled to hear that Jack supports "tightly focused, narrowly drawn mandates" since that means his next step should be to help the DVD industry move away from the multitude of regional encoding schemes to a single "standard."

After reading just the excerpt, I am reminded of a time when Saturday Night Live used to be funny - during the 1988 presidential campaign. The cast held their version of the debates and at one point, Jon Lovitz as Michael Dukakais listens to yet another inane answer from Dana Carvey as George Bush Sr., shakes his head, and says, "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy."