Another developing theme this evening: the supremely awesome density of the record industry. After a record industry executive threatens a university professor for linking to a critical blog post (see my post below), we now have the spectre of a recording industry representative — Jay Rosenthal, who runs SoundExchange, the entity that collects royalties for digital performances of music, such as Internet radio — saying, and I quote:
“I sincerely am starting to hate the Internet. I know you see the Internet as some incredible invention that has opened the door to unlimited distribution of music—and your lofty goal is to bring music to as many as possible. But all I see is a tidal wave of artist abuse.”
Rosenthal goes on to say that the Internet “is not becoming a beacon of light, but a cesspool of darkness.” Wow. That’s quite the well-reasoned argument there, Jay. Nice work. The comments come during a debate with publisher Kurt Hanson of the L.A. Times. In his thoughtful response, Hanson notes that:
“Your industry’s “success” here brings to mind what would have happened if the film industry had succeeded in its efforts to block the development of the home video industry. Had those lawyers succeeded, they would have deprived their companies of a future revenue stream (VHS and DVD sales) that’s now worth billions of dollars a year.
Your lawyers did succeed in shutting down the centralized service, so by forcing P2P file sharing into an uncontrollable environment, they deprived your companies of what could have eventually become a multi-billion-dollar revenue stream of monetized file sharing.”
Again, some nice work there. And when in doubt, blame the Internet.