i have noticed a trend in capitalism when it starts to fail in any sector or business

SCO is the great example
they sue everyone they think they can hoping one will pay off and when they dont POOF

30000 lawsuits times 5000 = 150 million in ten years or a measly 15 million a year
not exactly a big payout is it

the result has been word a mouth to p2p and millions nooo hundreds a millions getting 100% without you cause you install fear uncertainty and doubt into your own product

eventually they then decide to go after your isps
so prices rise , caps , throttling and guess what people with tons a “stuff” just go off the net and they still aren’t buying.

Oh my what now not only is Hollywood going to suffer but ISPS too? sooner or later it will totally unravel like the 6 billion lawsuit in Canada, showing they are counterfeiting others wares anyways so after or during this suit should not the people of Canada under a cdr levy be party too this as 450 million was given to the CRIA in fees?
WOULD those artists claim those fees or say …sorry for the trouble have a gift and lets start over be an interesting gift certificate wouldn’t it
450 /30 = 15$ towards buying cdrs and they set prices and you could buy Canadian?

i know rant rant
but hey its how ive seen it and with the wind mobile decision opening to foreign isp ownership
will Hollywood just buy out our isps now?
watch people DROP net large when you do so buyer beware.

Most of the discussion of the music industry’s difficulties is on a very short time-scale. I have discussed this amnesia before:

http://www.techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20080122/18320341#c218

but I would like to expand on it a bit.

We need to talk about music in terms of the industrial transition. In the pre-industrial period, no one had machinery, and everything was, perforce, at human scale. During the industrial revolution, selected people had access to machinery, which they could then use to treat other people as objects, eg. as assembly-line workers, or as part of the market for mass-produced goods, instead of customers for custom goods (“bespoke” as an English tailor would say). In the third phase, the post-industrial period, everyone has machines, and it is no longer possible to build a business model around having machines. This phase is post-industrial because machines, while ubiquitous, no longer define social relations. The third phase has enough similarities to the first phase that it is worth looking back to the first phase for analogies about how the new economy will be organized. So. To apply this to music, let’s look back a hundred and fifty years, before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Also, bear in mind that a microphone, an amplifier, and a loudspeaker are just as much a mass-production device as a printing press, a record-pressing plant, etc. They remove the limits of how many people can hear the speaker or singer’s voice. Once a performer had a microphone in his hands, he was operating in industrial mode.

That said, most of the proposed scarcities which Mike Masnick has been proposing are industrial products. For example, someone who wants to wear T-shirts with various artwork can buy a specialized computer printer, and print whatever he wants to print on a white T-shirt. The scarcities are likely to be at a personal level, where a large company does not offer any great advantage. In the pre-industrial period, large companies were usually quasi-governmental, eg. the Honorable East India Company.

The notion of a music fan is a comparatively recent idea. In 1859, the audience were “patrons,” something quite different, as I will develop later. I am somewhat skeptical about the music industry’s survival prospects, as an industry. I don’t think concerts are a way out. A concert depends on the element of mass-production in an applied sound system, both to enable the artist to play for many people, and to keep the artist at arm’s length from the audience.

Full scale rock concerts are held in stadiums, the only available venues capable of holding tens of thousands of fans. This means that they have common characteristics with professional sports. What they sell to the patron is the opportunity to be part of a crowd, and possibly a controlled riot, to do things he would ordinarily not be able to get away with. This factor overcomes the fan’s natural preference for viewing events and entertainments in the comfort of his own home.

There is a tendency to blanket stadiums with surveillance cameras. It has been discovered that the police can use the videos to track down and prosecute offenders after the fact, rather than attempting to arrest them on the spot. If the evidence isn’t good enough, the authorities just install more cameras until it is. Every time there is a stabbing, more cameras will be installed, and, once installed, the cameras will remain in place, and record what the English call “ASBO offenses.” There is no expectation of privacy in a stadium, and it is very difficult to argue against more cameras in a stadium on civil liberties grounds, more so than it would be on a public street. When this is combined with Ticketron’s “Photo-ID and Credit-Card” approach, the videos form a searchable database. The cameras are registered against the assigned seats.

This, I think, strikes at the heart of the economy of the stadium. The audience will discover that it is no fun to personally attend an event where they are expected to be on their best behavior, as considered retrospectively by video-witnesses who are entirely sober. Much the same applies to the larger and rougher sorts of clubs. In traditional small-town society, where there is no anonymity, where everyone knows you when you walk down the street, it is understood that if you want to behave in an uncontrolled way, the best place to do so is your own basement. There is a whole strata of society in which it is the norm to have a basement bar, where one can drink with one’s equals, but not with anyone else. The people who have power do their drinking in private with their friends, and cannot understand why a public establishment should not be regulated within an inch of its life. That is what I think will happen to arenas.

Now, returning to the way music actually was in the year 1859, I noted that the audience were patrons, not fans. It was understood that the artists were quite commonly the social inferiors of the audience. The real scarcity, the one which was paid for, was the personal service of the artists. The meaning of this varied. A man who played in a symphony orchestra could make a reasonable living teaching music to teenage girls– but it was understood that he would not be considered an eligible husband for the kind of girl whose parents could afford lessons, and it was preferable that he should be a married man, so that the issue would not arise. The same thing applied all the way up the ladder. Even the most famous musicians were striving for some kind of royal or official appointment or something of that nature. Now, of course, here we are talking about high music.

The low music, of the type which someone like Lily Allen produces, is something different. In 1859, that kind of music was performed by music hall artistes. Music hall artistes were not generally paid enough to live on. They were expected to round out their income with a spot of prostitution. The same went for the more theatrical elements of the high music (ballet dancers, female opera chorus singers). The more affluent members of the audience went to see a show, picked out a showgirl from the assortment on-stage, and, after the show, went backstage to arrange a one-night-stand. “Connect with Fans” had a very literal meaning, a gropingly physical meaning.

Now, in the post-industrial period, the position of a typical practitioner of the high music is no worse than it ever was. With the spread of affluence, all kinds of things are possible. The local ballerina might very well be able to convince the school board to pay her to give classes to children whose parents cannot afford to pay for lessons. In round numbers, state and local governments spend something like half a trillion dollars annually on education, and employ millions of teachers. That is wealth undreamed of by the recording industry, whose revenues are, I believe, falling from a peak of ten billion dollars or so. The education system has lots of room for people to be paid for teaching all kinds of things.

However, for the low music, the problem is different. If we take Lily Allen at her word:

http://www.techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20090923/1138026294#c42

No one wants their children to be taught that kind of thing. Granted that Lily Allen’s mental age is about fourteen… still, lots of fourteen-year-old girls make money babysitting, not a lot of money, of course, but enough to buy the kinds of things it is right for them to have. Obviously Lily Allen could never have done that. She seems to be the classic emotionally disturbed “Hollywood child.” The economic problem of pop music is that it is socially boxed in. It does not have access to the full resources of society, because it is a music of inferiority. The only personal service which the low music can come up with is prostitution.

Nell Gwyn (1650-87) was the classic pre-industrial actress-courtesan, but since her most notable customer was Charles II, she wound up as the founding mother of the Dukes of St. Albans. Charles had fourteen recognized bastards by various women, in which one can only regard as a public display of his virility.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nell_Gwyn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Allen