On the heels of the iPhone hubbub, Steve Jobs unleashed another epistle today by insisting that if the four labels (the four Ugly Sisters, as the great Rupert Perry calls them) got rid of copy protection, Apple would happily follow suit. As disingenuous as this may be, it’s hard to argue that the labels have done anything but a disgraceful job at moving into the new world. The worst-served constituency of the existing music model is the artists and composers themselves, who can’t make a living doing 200,000 units due to the bloat and inefficiency of the existing music model, the modern analog of the US steel industry.
Things have to die for new things to be born.
Any world that I’m welcome to is better than the world that I come from.
– Becker & Fagen
