The Napster Analogy | annotated by John

Deny the public what it wants at your peril

And the public does not want Joe Biden to be the Democratic nominee for President.

It always happens first in music. It’s the canary in the coal mine. It’s the hottest medium amongst the young people, our future (they’re here to replace us as Jerry Seinfeld said). Songs are small, malleable, can be created and distributed nearly instantly, nothing is holding listeners back from adopting the new, they’re not tied into mortgages or long term car leases. They’re open to the modern and different. And therefore the industry is always ready for disruption. As a matter of fact, it’s on the precipice of disruption right now and the major labels won’t admit it, if they’re even aware of it. They’re proffering ever fewer records in stale genres while ignoring the rest of the audience, the majority of the audience, to their detriment. Kind of like the publishing industry. Which killed the e-book when they recovered pricing power and Amazon could no longer sell digital copies cheaply. But now physical has tanked and there’s no potential upside, especially after they’ve trashed e-books for fifteen years. This is like rock, which said Spotify was the devil ever since its inception. Now rock is a backwater that is ignored by nearly everybody.

So, the recording industry thought it had a perfect product. The CD. Which was shiny and digital, which didn’t skip like vinyl or wear out like tape. Who would want anything more?

Well, how long a run did the cassette get? It’s hard to even claim twenty years, from sometime in the seventies until it expired in the nineties.

As for the long playing vinyl record... It reigned from sometime in the sixties until the eighties.

A student of the game would see that the CD started in 1982 and was ripe for disruption. But that couldn’t happen, because there was so much MONEY involved!

Yes, CDs were more expensive than previous formats, MUCH more expensive. And the artists were convinced to take lower royalties to help this medium grow, with the promise that said royalties would rise in the future, which never happened. What did happen is the executives got rich, richer than ever before, they became more powerful than the artists, and they wanted it all to continue.

There was only one problem, the customer...the customer felt ripped-off.

Only one good track on a CD. Furthermore, you couldn’t buy the one track you wanted, you had to get the rest of the dreck. This was frustrating, but the public had no choice.

But when you give the public a choice...

I don’t want to promote Donald Trump, but he did give the public an alternative. Hillary Clinton, a vastly superior candidate, was part of the past, part of the establishment. When jobs disappeared after NAFTA, who was looking out for the blue collar worker? Trump tapped into voter discontent and the Democrats and the media were stunned, positively stunned I tell you, when if you were in contact with the people who voted for Trump you could see this coming. But the problem was no one in D.C. or New York, in politics or the media, seemed to be in touch with the public.

So some youngster from nowhere starts Napster.

Well, it won’t take hold, it’s just a blip on the radar screen, because the public at large isn’t technologically-savvy and they don’t have high speed connections.

But it turned out the hoi polloi was more than curious, it wanted to partake, even at slow internet speeds, and Napster software was easy to use. And you should read the just posted Bill Maher piece in the “New York Times” re the public wanting something new here:

“Bill Maher: Why I Want an Open Convention”

Free link; https://t.ly/fER8M

Yes, Bill Maher. Not a cable news anchor, not a late night TV host. Maher is in his own lane, different, and this is always what gains notice and power, the establishment fades and the new takes over, this is why the major labels are teetering and don’t even know it.

But the labels, the old people knew better. MP3s didn’t sound as good as CDs. But it turned out the public didn’t care about the sound, never mind almost no one having the equipment to hear music at a high quality with the advent of cheap stereos and boom boxes. The MP3 was good enough. And it was portable. It was all about the music, first and foremost.

Well, the labels would teach the public a lesson. It sued Napster. And won, but not until everyone had experienced Napster and seen how great it was.

And then came KaZaA, which didn’t have the central database of Napster and therefore did not fit within its ruling.

Well, the labels sued that distribution platform. And then came lockers and... The public still “stole,” so the industry started suing the users themselves.

The public wanted a new model, and the record companies refused to give it to them.

And then along came Steve Jobs, with the iTunes Store. And when the labels wanted to raise the price, he famously said NO! That they were going to kill the business. Steve Jobs, a Bob Dylan and Beatles fan, worked in computing, he was living in the modern world, unlike the music titans still having their e-mail printed out by their assistants.

But the real savior was Daniel Ek. He literally saved the record companies, revenue went up. Hallelujah. But everybody inured to the old model couldn’t get over the new model, they kept carping. Ten bucks a month was too cheap. How come I’m not getting paid more?

And this continues, but we age every day. Other than wannabe musicians, no one is complaining about the new model, the Spotify model, it’s just the fading oldsters.

Once again, disruption comes from the outside. The record labels refused to disrupt themselves, they fought for their old model, even as revenues decreased.

Just like the Biden team.

Oh, we have options. That’s what Biden and his team are banking on. Watcha gonna do? Vote for Trump? No, maybe just stay home. When you’re disenfranchised with no options, when you’ve been ignored for eons, like the young Democrats, you’re sick of being told to get in line, you just stay out of the game, you protest. Ironically, like the Trump voters in 2016.

For every action there’s a concomitant reaction. You want to run a fading old man for President... It’s nearly impossible to convince those on the fence to pull the lever for him, and every vote truly counts, we learned that in Florida in 2000, never mind the battleground states of today.

The anti-Biden fervor is deafening. How do I know? In addition to the major media screeds, you’ve got to read the reader responses, at the “New York Times,” at the “Washington Post.” Almost everyone is anti-Biden, they don’t want him to run. And this is the liberal elite that Biden and his team consider his bedrock!

And then there’s the belief that the debate won’t matter, that no one will see it.

Want to see something? Watch Biden descend the steps after Thursday night’s debate:

https://t.ly/aFfJ-

This is all over social media. But Biden and his team have their heads so far up their rear ends that they don’t realize that’s how the younger (and in many cases OLDER) generations get their news and still believe putting their seconds on Sunday morning interview shows solves the problem.

The internet is flooded with evidence of Biden’s age. This story doesn’t die, it perpetuates, it gets stronger as the election nears!

As for short attention spans...

Sure, on some things, but not others. One faux pas can kill your career today. Assuming it’s egregious enough. Sure, Biden fans may still support him, but politics is not a niche enterprise, rather it’s a broad one, binary, and it impacts EVERYBODY!

But being scared of Trump is not enough to motivate everyone to vote. Especially in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions. I feel powerless, you probably do too. And our team, the liberal team, is now just as bad as their team. Close your eyes and follow, period. Otherwise be excoriated. I thought we were better than them, I guess not.

Clayton Christensen, the dearly departed business genius, said if you don’t disrupt yourself, someone else will. This is what happened in 2016, with Trump. The establishment could not see that the electorate had changed.

As for disrupting yourself, that’s the only way you survive. In other words, you get younger candidates, you appeal to the younger generations, their needs and wishes.

Instead the Democrats are selling us Biden, a CD, when new cars don’t even come with a CD player!

And then there are those pointing to the professor meme, the guy with statistics saying that we should stay the course with Biden, since he was right in the past. Until he’s not. I can’t tell you how many people have gotten it wrong in the past decades by relying solely on history. The past may be prologue, but it’s not definitive when it comes to the new. The music business was saved by a model that no one could have predicted, that no one could have fathomed, that when it arrived no one believed would work!

This election is an outlier. We’ve never had an 81 year old candidate before. None of the old models factor in age to the degree it’s important now.

Meanwhile, the Biden cabal wants everybody to STFU, speak out against him at your peril.

But what did we learn from music? All the insiders were publicly against Napster, but many used it themselves. But the labels had to present a unified front.

And at some point they said Doug Morris could not run a label anymore, he was too old. The torch had to be passed. Morris is 85, he was squeezed out of Sony in 2017. But Biden? He’s going to run the country, which is far more important than a record label!

I don’t want to give up, but I’m close. I’ve been a Democrat all my life. I’ve ridden the ups and downs. But this is a bridge too far.

Enough with the living in the past. We live in a digital world and all the oldsters can do is hate on the smartphone and do their best to get rid of TikTok. Do you hear the youngsters complaining about this? The oldsters have never experienced this, if they’re online they’re still on Facebook, where a youngster wouldn’t be caught dead. When it comes to digital, online, our oldsters do not know better, to their detriment. They’ve got no idea what is going on.

Yup, I want you to motivate young people to canvass for Biden like young people did for candidates back in the sixties and seventies. Never gonna happen. And the campaign is all about pessimism, how bad Trump is, there’s no optimism, none of the hope that Obama ran on, never mind JFK, or even Clinton!

But Biden knows better. He’s not listening to us.

But what he and his team don’t know is we’ve stopped listening to him. We’re worn out by the duplicity, the gaslighting. With so much on the line they want us to stay the course, put on blinders and embrace the CD.

Not gonna happen.

By: bob | 2024/07/01 | Music Business - Online - Politics - Technology | Trackback | Comments [RSS 2.0]

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