Former RIAA Boss States The Obvious: The Record Labels Screwed Up… And Continue To Screw Up

Say That Again

from the again-and-again-and-again dept

Hilary Rosen was the head of the RIAA for many years, and led the RIAA’s attack on Napster and other early file sharing systems. She resigned in 2003, just before the RIAA began its campaign of suing individuals for file sharing, though long after the strategy had been decided upon and put in place. Since she left the RIAA, she surprised people by saying a lot of things that seemed to go against her former views — including throwing some support behind Creative Commons, admitting that music interoperability was important (something the labels fought against for a long time) and then came her rather surprising admission that she believed suing file sharing platforms was a dead end strategy and that she hated DRM — and then even admitting that this has always really been a business model issue, rather than a legal issue. Of course, what she ignored is that she helped make that so.

Billboard is now running an interview with Hilary Rosen to discuss “10 years since the Napster decision” and she’s equally forthright, complaining about the many, many mistakes that the industry has made:

The one lesson the industry did not learn after Napster was speed. When you’re talking about technology, you have to move quickly on opportunities. The constant refrain is ‘there’s no money in these opportunities. There’s no advances. We don’t see the pay off.’ But the thing you have to keep pushing back on is ‘what are you comparing it to?’ If you’re comparing it to physical sales or comparing it to an iTunes download, then you’re right, it’s going to be hard. But what you really need to compare to is how else fans are getting the music, which is free. The lessons of Napster, of rapid fire adoption, have been too quickly forgotten. The industry has moved a little too slow and have not benefited as much as they might have by the benefits of technology.

She does a little to defend the RIAA by noting, accurately, that:

I think the RIAA became the central organizing vehicle for people’s anger. But they don’t work for the consumers. They work for the industry. It’s the business leaders in the industry that are calling the shots there.

That’s absolutely true, of course. But it leaves out the fact that the RIAA itself has always promoted the idea that it does represent the best interests of music itself, including for the consumer. And that was true when Rosen was there as well. So whenever politicians or the press want to understand what’s happening in the music world, they look for a quote from the RIAA, not recognizing that it’s a very twisted view — one focused on protecting a business model used by a single set of companies in the industry.

Either way, it’s a worthwhile read, though it reminds you how little the industry did back when it actually could have embraced the future.

Filed Under: hilary rosen, record labels
Companies: riaa