Rolling Stone has posted the first part of a two part series, written by Brian Hiatt and Evan Serpick, entitled: The Record Industries Decline.

Tomorrow they will focus on the future but this posting is good to read because it details just how dirt stupid the recording industry was back in the days of Napster. They could have been at the leading edge of the changes we find ourselves awash in but were unwilling and incapable of changing their core business.

I had a great uncle, his name was Rich, and he was a blacksmith, one of the last of his breed. He was a tough old wiry dude with that kind of straight ahead pragmatic view of the world and his place in it that you find in people like blacksmiths and farmers. They know what real is all about. In 1969, after Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon, my Great Uncle Rich decided that it was all a fraud and that it just couldn’t have happened. He held no grand theories of conspiracy to dupe the public. He just couldn’t take that one step further in his experience of how the world had been so rapidly changing around him. Landing on the moon? Too much. Too absurd. Impossible. Therefore it was not real. End of story. No amount of hyperactive arm waving and pubescent geeky boy energy spouting reams of scientific facts would sway him from his stance at the edge of the void which extended beyond his experience and into the future. I saw that then and marvelled at how the human mind can be so vast and still create (or encounter) very palpable barriers.

For my Uncle Rich it was impossible to land on the moon.

For the record industry it was impossible to stop doing business the way they always had.

My Uncle Rich is dead now. Not because he stopped believing in the world around him. He just got very old. It happens.

The recording industry is on its death bed. Shhhhhh. Walk softly. Speak in low gentle tones. No laughing or giggling at their plight. Yes, they brought it upon themselves. Yes, they are still being complete fucktard assholes as they go down swinging. Won’t change a damned thing. Listen closely. Hear that rattle? Won’t be long now.

In lieu of flowers download your favourite tune.

Will the film and television industries suffer the same fate?

They may. It’s early yet. They suffer from the same lack of imagination that kicked the legs out from under their musical compatriots. They have more legislative clout and deeper pockets to fuck with fundamental freedoms and completely shit all over democratic societies in their efforts to cling to their old-world view. The trick in this, as I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, is to see it as a race. How much can they fuck up before they die? How much can we keep from their destructive grasp before they expire? If we can run fast enough from the revenant undead and reach the top of the hill where the sun shines before the zombie hordes of Hollywood drag us down with them into their graves. I could go on for hours with this shit. Things are changing and they are changing for the good and we just need to be vigilant in our constant kicking in the nuts to the industry to let them know their old ways no longer work and they have to be imaginative enough to recreate their industry. And if they can’t do it they deserve to die.

The old adage of “Lead, Follow or Get Out Of The Way” very much applies.

The one quote from the Rolling Stone article that really jumped out at me was this from Hilary Rosen, former CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America:

“Peer-to-peer took hold. That’s when we went from music having real value in people’s minds to music having no economic value, just emotional value.”

Emotional value.

Hard to put a price sticker on that. Hard to put a chip on emotional value so you don’t walk out the store with it. Hard to save your business suing people because they are emotionally attached to your music and hold your outdated usurious business model in contempt.

A few years ago I was in a grocery store and I saw a box of Honey Nut Cheerios on the shelf. It had a round hole cut out on the front panel. You see that a lot these days but this was new. They’ve since put out all sorts of things like this: video games, hockey documentaries, etc. But I was amazed when I looked at the box and saw that they were giving away with the Cheerios a DVD of Robert Rodrigues’ Spy Kids. It was still in Blockbuster. It was still popular. And yet there it was. Miramax had made a deal.

Giving it away in a cereal box.

I knew then that the film industry was in deep shit. If they themselves were marketing their product like a plastic ring in a pack of Cracker Jack then how the hell do they expect us to respect their product? How much can it be worth? Free film library with every Happy Meal.

I used to adore cinema. I was passionate about the movies. I made Leonard Maltin look uninterested. I made Elwy Yost look like … well, like Elwy; no one can top Elwy. I used to love movies. But I’ve had a crisis of faith lately with that passion. The reasons are myriad and the business itself sucks from the inside worse than a toothless whore from the worst nightmares of Hunter Thompson; but that was a key moment in that decline of my own faith in film. The glamour was gone. They just weren’t special anymore. It was just more stuff.

These are profound and disruptive changes.

Will the film industry save itself? Or will large scale cinematic production take on the rarified atmosphere of an elitist endeavour like Opera? Or will it all collapse into a mire of user generated dreck that flow from YouTube and drowns us all in inanity?

Naw!

We’ll figure it out. The problem is that right now we just can’t see where we’re going. We’re standing at the edge of our own abyss and looking out into the void, peering through the fog, and wondering what’s on the other side. We see others laughing and running and leaping out into the fog and we have to trust they are landng somewhere substantial … or meaningful … or profitable.

I hope.

I dunno.

But I do know this: the future exists in our own imaginations. If we aren’t up the task of imagining our own future then we have no right to command how others live in it.

Lead. Follow. Or get out of the way.

Cheers.