And there’s something else unusual. Here’s a group of record companies that are doing well, both critically and commercially, which think the internet has helped them to this success, and can’t wait for the future to get here.

Beggars’ four labels XL, Rough Trade, 4AD and US stalwart Matador Records scooped up a fifth of the Times Top 100 records of the decade. The company recently scored the first indie number one for twenty years (Vampire Weekend), looks to have the critics choice for 2010 sewn up (Gil Scott Heron), and with The Xx has a band whose music suddenly seems ubiquitous, sprouting from every trailer and advert, as well as the BBC’s Election coverage.

Mills himself resigned from the BPI “years ago” and helped set up two powerful industry groups as a counterweight to the major labels: the Association for Independent Music (AIM) and Impala, a Brussels-based business network of companies and trade associations. Impala was crucial in persuading the Courts to overturn the European Commission’s decision to bless the Sony BMG merger. The collective licensing group Merlin, sometimes called a ‘fifth major’, also owes much to Mills’ desire to give more strength to the indies at the bargaining table.

The Beggars setup is also quite unusual, a bag of apparent contradictions. Mills still signs every cheque, and watches the weekly cashflow, but the labels, such as Richard Russell’s XL, have a lot of freedom. The core of the Beggars Group is an operations unit for the labels, but he doesn’t do budgets or ask the labels to do them for him. It’s impossible to predict how music will sell, he says, so why waste the time? In a business that became increasingly populated by suits in the 1990s, this is very unusual.

Mills spends a lot of time thinking about how to make money, but his distaste for “music corporations” is matched by concern about the “corporatisation of the individual”. You can’t imagine a New Media Strategist setting foot in the place, or surviving very long if they did. People work at Beggars for the love of music, and are good at finding it and promoting it.

So there’s a lot of reasons to pay attention to Beggars, and Mills’ thoughts on the future of music. We had a very wide-ranging interview last week covering everything from digital marketing to the Digital Economy Act. A few facts first, though.

The Beggars Banquet label grew out of an Earl’s Court record shop in 1976. Three years later it had picked up Tubeway Army, and found itself with a global pop star. But unlike other indies of the era it didn’t embark on overnight global expansion. This may be why unlike other contemporaries such as Stiff, Rough Trade or Factory, it survived. 4AD was launched in 1979, XL a decade later. It picked up Matador in 2002 and Rough Trade three years ago.

The group now employs around 130 staff worldwide. Between them, the labels invest in 20 new acts a year. Digital revenues are around 50 per cent of the total, far higher than the industry average. The Vampire Weekend number one sold 126,000 in its first weekend, of which 70,000 were digital downloads. In the UK digital is about 20 per cent (up to 30 for new releases, says Mills) while in Europe the ratio is much lower.

There’s also a distinctive profile to the success: Beggars’ labels are much better at selling full-length albums.

“We are four times as likely to convert a fan into an album buyer, rather than a track buyer. It makes a fan that we engage worth ten times as much to us. If you look at The Xx album, they’re selling three tracks for every album, a 1:3 ratio. The industry average is more like 1:10 or 1:12.”

The internet has improved things radically for independents, something borne out by the US success, with its more mature digital market.

“There’s fewer gatekeepers now. We don’t have to knock on a TV station’s door or a radio station’s door and it’s made us far more competitive. We released the MIA film yesterday and within minutes, it was everywhere. We didn’t have to go through a process to try and persuade someone to give it an exclusive. Our ability to get the message out without intermediaries is unencumbered,” he says.

“There’s a wide highway in front of us we can go speeding down, and it wasn’t there even two years ago. It means the majors are looking at a world where only 35 Gold Albums a year are certified compared to ten times that recently. But going above Gold in the US is not a problem for us.”

The internet has revived interest in music, thinks Mills, by encouraging people to experiment.

“It’s made so much more possible – a greater and deeper love of music. It’s re-stimulated my own involvement in music generally, rather than just my business. The links people send you allow you to go off down a path and discover something great.

“People who in their 30s a few years ago who may have stopped listening to new music, or were listening to iterations of music they heard in their late teens or early twenties, are now able to discover entirely new things. You’ve got new artists being discovered by 30, 40, 50 and 60 year olds. You’ll now have a group of friends talking about music and sending links. I think that comes from the integration of the laptop into both our working and our personal lives, the internet is so great at spreading the word.”

It’s also made production cheaper.

“The scale of our investment has changed. Recording is cheaper these days. Film making is cheaper. You can make the raw materials that we invest in miles more cheaply. The excesses of record deals largely disappeared, so we much more able to invest at a realistic level, rather than an insane level, which we sometimes had to do, and sometimes we still do. But we’re probably signing 20 new artists a year across the 4 labels, and investing significantly in all of them. We still spend 20-30 per cent of our turnover on artists. So although it’s at a level more sensible than it was, it’s still very significant, and it’s what we do.”

In recent years, the Beggars labels have had established acts knocking on their door, such as Radiohead. I wondered if this altered the investment pattern?

The artists we’ve done we thought were truly exceptional. We’ve no desire to be where Sanctuary were in their heyday. We’re all about getting a band to a stage where you can see it’s working.”

The reason for the independents singing a different tune to the majors, he suggests, is quite interesting.

“You read the industry is 60 per cent of the size it was ten years ago. But that 40 per cent that has gone is almost entirely the cream at the top. Records that sold two million now sell 500,000 – that’s where that’s gone. At the same time it’s easier to sell those slightly smaller levels.

“What’s called pejoratively ‘the new middle class’ is someone like, say, Calexico or Midlake, who can sell 100,000 plus records every time they put out a record; they can play to 3-4,000 people in 30 or 40 cities around the world. And they can make a pretty good living out of that, doing what they love doing, and can do it on their own terms, and that’s fantastic. We’ve got a bunch of bands like that, they’re not necessarily seeking stardom or riches. That’s incredibly healthy.”

But it’s still recorded music that drives the success, most of the time.

“99 per cent of what you hear about artists who can survive on their own playing live is crap. It’s recorded music that drives success in other areas. Something like Enter Shikari was clearly a contrary example, and Mumford and Sons are something of an exception too – they built a large live following before putting out records – but there are very few exceptions.”
Radical Reforms needed

Despite the sunny outlook, and his belief that its “probably bottomed out, the onslaught of free music is retreating”, Mills says the industry needs to reform itself radically, and lose its fear of commercial experiments. The future is in new services we haven’t seen yet – but it’s still too hard for these services to start selling music.

Some kind of statutory licensing would help the next Spotify or We7, he thinks. Not an open-to-all statutory, where punters could come and help themselves to all the world’s music for a fiver a month – but a B2B experiment – something to help intermediaries obtain licenses.

“We have to make licensing easier and faster, not necessarily cheaper, but easier. We’d like to see some kind of short-term government-endorsed trial structure that we could experiment with for 12 or 24 months, and see the impact of it.”

What would stop some joker turning up, who had no business plan, or maybe even no intention of ever paying for the licenses?

It would need some kind of government agency to approve licensees. But regulators already decide who can run a TV station, or call themselves a bank – there is a threshold. “You’d have a validation process so not everybody who turned up got one.”

Mills says the flat-fee collective licensing of ISPs, touted by some as a panacea with a zeal bordering on the religious, doesn’t have much industry support.

“Peter Jenner has been very vocal about that for a long time. He likes to characterise himself as a crazy eccentric. He’s a lovely guy but there isn’t a huge amount of support in the music industry for something that radical, and it’s not needed. A lot of markets are working quite well. Look at the growth of the download market, it’s pretty healthy. We have 5 to 10 per cent growth a year in digital albums, it’s heading to 30 per cent of the market now.

“Having a single way of consuming music for a fixed amount, that’s same for everyone around the world, is nuts I think. It’s not needed.”

It would also be bad for independent labels who cater to music lovers. By contrast, he’d welcome an offering of a fixed bundle of downloads, via an ISP.

“Unlimited all-you-can-eat offers would hurt us badly. Our market is dedicated high-spending music fans. If you’re Universal, sacrificing the few high-spending fans they have to get many more low-spending fans is probably a good bet. We’re on the other side of the mirror. Much as I would embrace it philosophically, I can’t embrace it practically. There has to be a limit or cap. It would hurt our artists.”

The industry also has to create a global database of repertoire, he says.

“We need a database to track and identify tracks properly and who the performers are. We should have had it ten years ago, it becomes a bigger task with each year. It’s a minefield of partially-attributed rights. When you license a song for a compilation in Australia, you don’t know where the money will end up.”

The Mandybill: was it necessary?

On to the subject of piracy then.

“We know some of our best purchasers are also pirates,” says Mills. “People consume our music in a mixture of ways. Some only pay for it, some pay for none of it, and some do both. We accept that, and don’t want to attack our own fans.

“You’re never going to get rid of free music, partly because we know you can’t, and any time you put a price on a copyable monopoly good, you’re going to get copied, but also because we’re in the business of circulating music for nothing. I can’t remember the last album we didn’t post one MP3 from. We’re using that in a controlled manner, as part of the process of making it available for sale. It’s managed, and it’s what the band wants to happen.”

The argument that P2P leads to purchases has a grain of truth to it, but it’s probably been over-emphasised:

“I think there’s certainly a percentage of file sharing usage, historically, which provided a discovery process that led to sales. There’s also a percentage which was a direct substitute for sales. Now, you’ve got the likes of Spotify and I think that it drives a coach and horses through that argument. You don’t need to file share to discover music now. If you want to discover things and listen to them you can do it legally, though I do think we should make tracks available for sale as soon as they’re being played on air.”

Other factors played their part in the decline of sales, he notes, not just P2P. “CD burning made the most immediate and obvious difference. I don’t believe swapping should remain outside copyright, we should enable private copying in return for a right to remuneration.”

Yet despite Mills’ long-running battles with majors, and a much more nuanced view of file sharing, he welcomed the passage of the Act.

“Your comment recently, that it was an astonishing result in the circumstances, was really right. The forces ranged against it happening were huge and well funded, and completely dwarfed the rights industries, not just the music industry. The government made it happen against the odds. There’s a long way to go, and a lot of it is still undecided, but the principle is now there, and the principle as now supported by Parliament – which is that creators have to be rewarded for their work. That has to be valuable.

“It was not perfect but it had to be done.

“I find it quite hard to understand the right to free music, or the right to an internet connection. If you don’t pay your water bill, you get cut off.

“The BPI doesn’t represent the whole industry. It represents the major record labels. I think that the creation of UK Music has helped – it’s given the industry a more moderate collective voice. The big record companies are hardliners, and they have every right to decide how they want to play the game, but the independents are bit different.

“That said, I think the BPI is more open to debate than it used to be.

“It’s not in anyone’s interests for the majors to do badly; they become defensive. We’re at the mercy of the market leaders, they frame the market, and we have to operate within it.”

Mills stresses that it’s now up to the industry to get better at selling music, in all kinds of ways:

“I’m still astounded that you need a credit card for iTunes, something beyond the reach of most teenagers, while you can’t buy music by text message.

“The last ten years shows the record industry is not able to provide its own solutions – you need an iTunes to do it.” He says the industry has to recognise the skills of retailers again. It’s never been very good at introducing these things, “perhaps understandably, because it’s not their business … majors tend to be about control”.

But he thinks even though music is digital, independent music stores will come back again, as places to discover music again.

It’s unusual to hear an optimistic view of selling music, but Beggars and the leading British Independents point the way to a revival.

“The technology was sort of there. That software was there, and it was good – I wouldn’t do it that differently now. The basic model was just as appropriate then as it is now.”

– Chris Castle.

Read more at The Register

…Read more at The Register

Read more at The Register

Don’t judge a book by the title. Especially if the title is something like Cyburbia. James Harkin, who worked with Adam Curtis on The Trap, has produced the first proper full-length critique of Web 2.0 – tracing the daftness back to the cybernetics pioneers of the 1940s.

It’s odd that something with so much hype as Web 2.0 has received so little intelligent criticism. Half of Nick Carr’s The Big Switch, looked at the social and psychological implications, and he’s following up at length in The Shallows.

But Cyburbia takes a different approach. By looking at the mania for feedback in a historical context, Harkin finds a common thread in subjects as diverse as military strategy, TV shows like Lost, as well as the interwebs.

Q. We’re used to cyber-everything but can you define cybernetics for us?

Harkin: There are a lot of definitions but the simple idea I use is this idea that what distinguishes human beings, or what’ smost important about humans, is that they exist on a continuous information loop defined by a constant stream of messages we’re sending or receiving.

Now you can interpret the world in that way – me picking up a glass, say – but it is just a metaphor. The story of my book is how this metaphor, created by Norbert Wiener, because of its beauty, became the inspiration for a new medium and influencing how we live. It’s given rise to all this incredible technology, but the idea of fitting ourselves into that mould will mean we’re the losers.

The central image of the book is Cyburbia, this strange alternate world where we watch each other and the minutiae of each others’ lives.

You might have stared out of your window in suburbia in the 1950s and seen a few people across the street, but now you can stare at millions of other people. The danger is that when you spend all your time deciphering what other people are up to, you never get around to doing something original on your own, because you’re so swamped by opportunities to go onto other people’s lives on blogs, social networks and Twitter.

Did you start off with cybernetics and then see parallels around us today, or did you start with Web 2.0 and trace it back?

I started off with the image of Cyburbia because I liked it, the image of people retreating from the world and staring at other people’s lives. Now that’s a nice image but it doesn’t really explain a lot .So I began to trace it back to first Stewart Brand and then back to Norbert Wiener, a brilliant polymathic genius. I traced it back to the hippies then realised it goes quite far back beyond them.

Now I’m not arguing people are stupid or lazy if they do that – but there’s an electronic peer pressure online. Academic studies that have been done by people who are very sympathetic to Web 2.0 and networks, people like Clay Shirky and Duncan Watts, show that the whole decision making process tends to become a robotic routine. One person makes a decision, and everyone else falls in line.

One aspect of the suburbia of the 1950s we see online is the conformism. This is incredibly ironic, because this medium was set up, for political reasons, to be incredibly individualistic and creative and non-conformist.

What I like about the book is that it doesn’t fall into the trap of responding to utopianism with a dystopianism: that we’re all doomed. That’s a really common response, but people are intelligent, and discerning about technology. How do you resolve this then?

At the risk of sounding dreadfully like Marshall McLuhan, people haven’t quite understood it as a medium yet. They’ve become so focussed on the idea that we’re “freeing ourselves from the authority of the ‘mainstream media”, that we think that pressing buttons on a computer to talk to your neighbour is an authentic way of communicating. It’s not.

The net is a medium like any other and has its biases, like any other. The biases are different.

The problem people have is that they’re reluctant to describe it as a medium – they see it as a political idea, not a medium. So circumventing the mainstream media is not in itself authentic.

As you know, Andrew, if you criticise Web 2.0, people get offended. It’s peculiar that they should get offended: you’re criticising a medium. What they see is you criticising a groundswell of popular democracy, a movement, which it isn’t at all. It’s a bunch of machines.

There’s an odd aspect to cybernetic ideas a few of us have noticed, which is that some people who adopt them go off the deep end, and lose their minds. They dive in completely. They really lose their sense of self.

If you’re engaging with the internet gurus who are very evangelical about Web 2.0 you’ll hear a very good argument. And that’s for the first time in history, millions of people around the world can have a voice. They can input all their thoughts into this system, and people can read them unmediated by anyone. Now, that’s interesting, and it’s a good and a challenging argument. But if you stop and think about it for a second, it’s also wrong.

It’s wrong in an instructive way. To confuse any kind of democratic movement with typing words into an electronic machine which no one may ever read is really quite insulting. Given the history of modern democracy – everything from the French Revolution to the Civil Rights movement, to the Miners’ Strike – to say that ‘this is the first time people have had a voice’ actually tells you a great deal about the lack of understanding the Web 2.0 people have.

Yeah, I first came across six years ago with the bloggers Googlewashing. They replaced a real political movement with a synthetic one. I thought they’d be a bit embarrased by this, but they couldn’t see why people who had gone on marches against the Iraq invasion were pissed off with them.

It’s scary. It’s not pedantic to say if you can confuse the ability to type things into a blog no one will ever read with a voice, then something is deeply wrong with your political philosophy.

People who are being critical of Web 2.0 and this constant and continuous flow have a difficult time of it. It looks like you’re pissing on someone else’s parade. But I think there are serious and important arguments, here. The intellectual justifications that have been made by internet gurus are simply wrong.

And these are people who are being paid large amounts of money by companies to reorganise how the rest of us work.

Jaron Lanier suggested a reason for people going bonkers. He picked out neo-Darwinism as an example of a cybernetic idea that prompts this. The belief “.. that what Darwin described in biology, or something like it, is in fact also the singular, superior description of all creativity and culture” as an example of cybernetic totalism. This is a hole Richard Dawkins fell into.

I’m not an expert on Dawkins, but I can argue that part of my story is a sort of tragi-heroic story. It’s a story about people who, over the last 60 years, have been trying so hard to implant themselves into a network. They very much wanted to become a node in the network, because they saw the network as being so much more powerful. In doing so, they lost their sense of human-ness.

But the network isn’t as powerful as the adverts suggest. Human-ness is infinitely more powerful than an algorithm.

It’s similar to the Singularity idea, where we weld ourselves into a cybernetic system, and in about 2040, or whenever it’s supposed to be, we disappear like a puff of smoke.

Technology should be so much better. The web has hardly started, really. But only the new priesthood of web designers are allowed to criticise it, or make improvements. There is a grain of truth in what the evangelists say, it’s the mountain of crap they’ve piled on top of it that’s the problem.

The evangelists are simply wandering about waving empty books, saying “Look, a book! How incredible. Pay me fifteen grand to talk about an empty book.”

It’s a transitional period. Even skeptics like us need to emphasise the positive.

I’ve done that for years by advocating legal, licensed P2P file sharing, which I find almost everyone except a few activists would to have at least like to have the choice to use. Most technology utopians hate it though because it’s an admission of failure. Free music is about the only real ’success’ the nets have delivered.

There’s another view of Web 2.0 evangelists which I call ‘Why not?’ For example, ‘Why not turn up at Grand Central Station wearing underpants in a big Flash Mob?’

But I don’t think ‘Why Not?’ is good enough. Things need to have a purpose. If you have a project or a purpose, you can use the medium to achieve that. With no ideas, no project, you have nothing. The evangelists simply believe can use this metaphysical glow of this medium to woo people.

People forget the world’s first Flash Mob in 2003, organised by Bill Wasik, was a joke. It was a joke on the gullibility of New York hipsters who would react to any kind of electronic information, and do anything you told them.

What’s fascinating is that the ‘Why Not?’ ethos of Web 2.0 people started as a joke against them.

Web 2.0 people don’t do jokes. Cannot compute. Now Linus Torvalds, the guy who started Linux, likes to say that technology doesn’t change people, people change the technology. Again, isn’t there a risk over-estimating some of the effects of technology?

McLuhan’s argument was that media give rise to everything, that media is the root of modern life. Obviously that isn’t true, and I’d never argue that. But it has an effect. Moving from oral storytelling to reading books by candle light did change things socially. It’s important to recognise that.

The oral tradition changed but I can’t buy that the human appetite for hearing a story diminished – we love stories more than ever probably, they just come in so many different forms.

People want zig-zaggy stories now. If we can discuss it without surrendering to it, we can find new ways of telling stories that baffle people, knock them off balance, and get them engaged. That’s good. But Web 2.0 is antithetical to a real understanding of what media can do to culture, because all it says is let’s surrender to the medium, and do whatever it wants to do.

When you look around you though, the best cultural operators are not surrendering their authorship or control, they’re using it to entice audiences with new kinds of stories.

I think the media obsession is an example of over-estimating the impact of technology. I find London media, marketing and advertising agency people are completely obsessed with Web 2.0, but it’s a phrase you’ve ever heard anyone else use. People just pick up the tools, use them, and are really discerning about technology. The BBC goes on about little else.

It’s dangerous because these people are prone to take all the Web 2.0 claims at face value.

I first wrote about Second Life because I was sick of reading utter rubbish. The first line of the repot would always be “I’m sitting here on Copacabana beach with loads of girls and a deep blue sea, and – bingo – I’m not in Brazil, I’m in Second Life.”

This is no way to understand any medium. Instead of trying to understand what the medium can offer, they’re simply surrendering to the whole idea.

It’s partly a demographic issue. You have a very ageing mainstream media and pompous executives who are desperate to reach out to a new audience to who aren’t watching their programmes any more. The danger is because of the demographic distance between executives and audience they take the claims at face value, there’s no critical distance whatsoever.

Why do you think that is, though? Twitter is a great example. An editor or a reporter at a newspaper needs to turn off part of their brain to write about Twitter uncritically. Part of their brain part is going ‘This is really daft’, another part is saying ‘This is cheesy’ and another voice is probably saying ‘Stop. This is a kind of behaviour that has never caught on.’ Yet they silence all those doubts. They’ll throw out evidence to the contrary.

If you’re a journalist in Fleet Street or the BBC it’s difficult to be critical, because these commands come on down from on high. BBC radio people tell me the kind of pressure they’re under to use Twitter.

Large media companies are laying off good, seasoned journalists at the same time as they’re paying these internet gurus huge sums of money to talk rubbish about the medium.

It would be a shame if we abandoned seasoned journalists who are capable of researching and breaking stories, and capable of doing more than just simply going on Google, in favour of people who are simply obsessed with the medium. That’s the danger.

Do you think it’s insecurity as Adam [Curtis] says? Or are they feeling guilty about being in this privileged position of being in the media?

It’s a transitional phase we’re in. But if journalists are messing around, then that’s a problem, they should be doing what journalists should do.

Why should they bother when they have this instant, hyperreal world they’ve constructed for themselves? Web 2.0 gives these new media journalists everything they would otherwise be drawing from the real world if they did their jobs properly. It’s an endless supply of novelty – and it promises to describe the world in a new way. It’s an alternative reality. The credibility of the media goes down all the time with ordinary people the more they write about Twitter, or whatever the Twitter will be next week.

It’s not going to rescue your media operation. If they want to save the idea of newspapers and put them online they need to take a step back from Web 2.0, rather simply chase a young demographic around like pedophiles at a playground.

One aspect of Cyburbia I didn’t find so convincing was the argument that the TV show Lost, for example, or the movie Memento, are cybernetically influenced because they’re non-linear stories. But Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five weren’t either, and you’ve got modernists like Joyce before that. Or Tristram Shandy

I did anticipate that. My argument is that all of these things – non-linearity, stories going off in different directions – are not unique and contemporary at all. They’ve been the stuff of high culture for almost a century. Jean Luc Godard famously said a film should have a beginning , a middle, and an ending – but not necessarily in that order. But they’ve become part of popular culture for a generation, by people playing fast and loose with computer games, texting and the internet. Remember that Kubrick’s movie The Killing [1956] where he used these devices was a big flop – maybe it was too early.

Fair enough. I’ll give you that.

You’re positive about a lot of aspects of technology, then…

It’s easy to be written off as a miserable old bastard.

Hah. Well brace yourself, I think you will be called that anyway by people who have the Web 2.0 religion, from their point of view everyone who disagrees is a miserable old bastard.

The positive aspect is that people are ripe for new ways of working, new forms of story telling – but we have to take a step back from the hype of whatever the latest manifestation of the Web 2.0 is and focus on how people are changing . The changes brought about by computers games, texting and the internet will have moulded us very delicately over the past 30 years into creatures who may be more jumpy, might more sophisticated, or may be keener to design associations and patterns of information.

All this could be harnessed, but we need to take a step back from the idea we just surrender to this self-organising system, and reclaim our human-ness.

So to introduce the first of some regular specials from Chris, here are his views on the music business’ biggest errors – and whether there’s any cause for optimism. He’s never dull, it’s mostly Chris in his own words…

Read more at The Register.

This time, Robertson shot first: suing EMI in September. EMI counter-sued two months later. MP3tunes automatically syncs your iTunes or WMP collection online.

“They’re playing tough and mean and nasty,” he says. “There are five safe harbour provisions in the DMCA. The third one (512c) says that if you’re storing the file at the direction of the user, you’re exempt. That’s exactly what we do.”

On the other hand, 512c is what covers Google’s YouTube service – and Google has vowed to clean up the service from infringing material. But Robertson says there’s no sharing, in contrast to other services.

“You can’t play music out of a locker, and there’s no anonymous access or wink-wink nudge-nudge sharing where we look the other way. Xdrive – pick anyone – everyone has anonymous access where you can share it with the world.

“Here’s how I like to think about this. Our business is the delivery of the music. You have it at home and play it at work. The labels never thought about the delivery.

“The business we’re in, the distribution business, doesn’t have to be a threat. It could be a best friend to the retail side. We can be your best partner.”

All good points. I thought what the labels feared was what Robertson might do, once everyone had a digital locker. In that sense, it was like the book authors and publishers litigation against Google Books.

But Robertson has noticed something that we hadn’t noticed before.

Which is quite spooky.

“If you look at the lawsuits that are pending, they seem to be doing a very good job of divvying up the litigation. Warner is suing some, EMI are suing others – and I find that very curious. There’s not one where they’re suing the same company!”

Indeed not. Universal Music is going after Grouper, Warner Music is taking on Seeqpod, and EMI has sued MP3Tunes.

It’s odd, since the Big Four are acutely sensitive to anti-trust allegations – to the extent that they can’t co-ordinate anything positive.

So was he mulling a formal anti-trust complaint?

“I have never really thought about that,” he told us. “I’m not a government intervention kind of guy. I’d rather let the marketplace settle it out.”

We pointed out Scott McNealy is another instinctive libertarian – who nevertheless believed in anti-trust action. But he wouldn’t be drawn.
The new Microsoft of Music

Much of the litigation by the big record labels against internet companies is being settled with the majors taking an equity stake. Robertson noted how the new MySpace music operation was jointly-owned by the labels and News Corp.

“News Corp is creating another entity that’s a MS Music Inc. to the labels. But if you’re small you don’t have that option. We don’t have a Microsoft sugar daddy to lean, to bring 100 million customers to the door, or big name branding.”

Robertson was also sour on the prospect of major labels and network operators striking one-off deals – covenants not to sue – then walking away.

“If the companies get payment up front there’s no long-term alignment of interests – but that’s not what’s happening. There’s equity and it guarantees payment to the label, so they don’t need to care.”

He warned that if the case was lost, record companies would go after other services next.

“How many MP3 attachments are on GMail’s servers now? I’ll go out on a limb and say they have an equal number of MP3s on their servers right now. So… our case is an important one.”

With the music and broadband businesses at a historic crossroads, Feargal gave us a glimpse of some of the closed-door discussions we might see next.

[ full interview at The Register ...]

Independents have a different business model, and have embraced digital networks as an opportunity, not a threat.

In the past few years the indies have organised, and successfully fought mega-mergers in the European Courts; they licensed the original Napster, and shunned DRM en masse. More recently, the indies have pioneered a one-stop stop for global digital licensing, Merlin, something beyond the organisational abilities of the RIAA.

So after hearing from IFPI chairman John Kennedy here this week, you’d expect a very different view of the music business from Martin Mills, chairman of British indie the Beggars Group – and you’d be right.

[full interview at The Register...]