[Thomas W. Bethe]

The Madison avenue types that control much of the music industry are NOT primarily musicians and have publicly stated on numerous occasions that they could be selling shoes, farm tractors or widgets because they are MBAs and or lawyers and their job is to make money and they really don't care what product they are selling.

Music, as WE all know, is not a widget nor a farm tractor nor shoes and their way of dealing with the music business shows that they lack the most basic understanding of what people today are looking for. Things like focus groups are fine if you are selling appliances or hair shampoo but are an unnatural way of looking at "products" when it comes to music.

Record companies today are still primarily run on models that worked in the 60s and 70s but have little relevance today. They have NOT kept up with the times and when confronted with things like peer to peer file sharing they choose to litigate instead of finding ways to give the fans what they really wanted which was access to the songs they wanted to hear and not what some record exec decided should be on an album. When I-Tunes was first proposed the record companies balked at the very idea of selling tunes over the Internet because it is did not fit the model they had in place. It has proved to be a fantastic revenue source for them but they fought it tooth and nail at the beginning.

Peer to peer file sharing also opened up music to a whole lot of people that were more interested in the music than they were purchasing it. Stealing songs over the Internet hurt not only the record companies but individual up and coming artists because with lessening revenues record companies could no longer afford to take a chance on a new unproved artist so they went with ones that were proven money makers or they created new artist from scratch like they did with the boy bands.

The music industry today is in turmoil. It is a mess and is getting worse not better. It will eventually have to evolve but how long that will take and in what direction it will go is anyone's guess.

MTCW