Google Executive: “You Cannot Devalue Music. It’s Impossible” blathers away about a pyramid of music fans paying more money towards the top and the industry’s solemn duty to encourage fans to migrate higher. Commenter “WhoCares?” nails the money quote, and I pound the point home:
WhoCares?
Blahblahblahblahblah.
It’s all just crafty rhetoric out of his mouth. Who cares?
Here’s the most telling part of his little self-indulgent pontification : “None of this is new. What’s new is that the casual fans no longer have to buy if they don’t want to.”
EXACTLY. Just stop there, Price. You don’t have to say anything else. That’s all that needs to be said.
Bottom line: Musicians should and must be allowed to say “If you don’t pay, you don’t get to listen.”
That’s what IP is there for. If you break it, you screw artists. Plain and simple.
skierpage
Exactly. There’s always been a free tier of music, where you asked the record store to play a song, or ask a friend to make a copy, or listen to random songs on the radio. Now the legitimate free tier is vast with lots of bands offering free downloads, the Internet Archive offering thousands of live shows for free, etc. It’s a golden age!
But consumers don’t want “Rosemary Krust”s free performances, they want popular professionally-made songs by known artists. They’re all out there cheaper than they’ve ever been, high-quality and DRM-free, on Amazon/Google Play/iTunes; it’s a golden age! But instead consumers search for “<song name> free download” or “watch” entire albums on YouTube, through the magic of technology they get something for nothing, and only Google gets $$$$. It’s disingenuous to call it “don’t care to pay” when you enable and profit from flattening the pyramid into a pancake where everyone but a few die-hard music fans finds whatever they want in the “don’t HAVE to pay” tier, *regardless of the wishes of the artists!*
So ultimately he’s a hypocritical disgusting prick.
