I agree that both quotes make the co-CEOs sound ridiculous and ill-prepared for the future. However, I find it amusing that not one person has provided a solution. It’s easy to point out failure, but much harder to go out on the ledge and say this is what needs to be done and here’s why it will work.

Boycotting would work, except for the fact that 90% of the top downloads/physical sales come from a major label. Even indie labels, like Sub Pop, receive a huge portion of funding from majors. Without this funding, many will cease to exist as well. So if you only want to listen to that 10%, go right ahead. When labels do go belly up, virtually all quality music will dry up. No good songs on the radio, no good songs to download (legally or illegally online).

In the meantime, as a music fan, I think the better path is to find a solution that embraces digital but also provides a reliable cash stream.

“Look at the fact that very few artist manage to get radio play and blow up w/o any label help, be it an indie or major.”

Much of this is because the broken laws are such that a hand full of people own exclusive privileges to use many of the public airwaves which has made it much easier for a hand full of people to game the system in a way that ensures that everything that’s easily available to the public is only available at monopoly prices. The same is true for cableco infrastructure, the government has taken away our rights to build new infrastructure granting a small group of people exclusive privileges over those rights.

Back in the early days of public airwaves public airwaves were much like a communication medium. They provided so much public utility that it would create a huge backlash for the government to take the right to broadcast on them from the public and grant exclusive privileges to the top one percent all at once. (it’s like if you put a frog in boiling water all at once, it jumps out. You put it in warm water and slowly heat it, it eventually boils to death). So what did they do? They first started to regulate it under the fake pretext that it’s for the best interest of the public by ensuring that there was a certain amount of competition. Eventually they kept on reducing the required amount of competition until eventually the government granted completely took away our rights to use public airwaves and granted evil rich people exclusive unowed privileges over those airwaves.

The solution? Disbar the FCC and allow the public to use public airwaves however the free market would allow.

First of all, as a two way communication medium (and not a braodcasting medium) you can get twice the data flow per bandwidth.

Secondly, it would create an influx of new technologies, like WiFi, that people can use to create networks of information transfer.

Thirdly, it would ensure that more information that gets transmitted in any given local area was more relevant to the people demanding it. You wouldn’t have one broadcast station that served everywhere, that’s inefficient, you would have multiple different people broadcasting different things in different areas which would reduce unnecessary redundancy.

It’s like how the cell phone system is broken down into many many cells. If you had just one huge cell that everyone had to share the same bandwidth on, it would be terribly inefficient, no one would be able to get nearly as much bandwidth. But if you get to divide the areas into smaller regions and have a system where people can request what information they specifically want in their small specific area you can a MUCH MUCH larger selection of radio stations and much more information flow as a whole (since you now utilize two way communication in more areas for one thing).

For instance, a good system would be to have one small band that broadcasted every station/URL that was playing and on what frequency it was playing on in a specific area. Now, if I request station X and it’s playing in my specific local area (perhaps the local area can be, say, anything within a mile of me or perhaps the cells can be divided into blocks of a mile) my tuner would just tune into that station. If I were to request a URL that wasn’t playing in my area and there was free bandwidth in my area, the tuner would then broadcast what I wanted to play in my area and list it. Anyone else who asks for that same URL can listen to that same station.

and this is completely feasible. If cell phones can service so many people in the same area, both with Internet and voice, especially given the extremely small amount of bandwidth they require (as compared to how much goes into television and radio already, ESPECIALLY television which is a COMPLETE bandwidth HOG compared to cell phones), then if you allocate all of the available bandwidth into a radio/television on demand system, everyone can create their own personal radio station on the Internet and allow anyone to listen to it anywhere on demand. Also, radio spectra is not even digitally compressed.

But George Bush was afraid that if the spectra were to go digital and compression would free a lot of bandwidth, that extra bandwidth would end up somehow serving the public good. So he ensured that everything went digital on HIS terms, on the terms that the top one percent get exclusive unowed privileges of the freed airwaves. Bush did a bad thing, he did so intentionally, he knew what he was doing was wrong.