A few weeks ago a consortium of German web and media folks published the interesting and provocative Internet Manifesto on online journalism. One particular point stood out to me as relevant to the music industry:
12. Tradition Is No Business Model.
There is money to be earned with journalistic content on the internet. There are already many examples today. However, the competitive internet requires adapting the business model to the structures of the web. Nobody should try to refrain from these adaptions by means of protective policies. Journalism needs open competition for the best ways of refinancing through the web, and the courage to invest in their many implementations.
There clearly are many parallels to the music industry, with its own challenges in the digital realm. Major labels have long tried to resort to protective policies to try to combat piracy or legit ways to distribute content online. Instead of investing in Napster and taking ownership in innovation, they sued. Instead of waking up to reality and extending ownership rights and revised royalty structures for their artists, they tried pushing through land-grab 360 deals, effectively pushing bands like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails out of the major label model.
I believe it’s too late for the major labels at this point, and we’re in a state of “destroy and rebuild”. Journalism however, might still have a shot at redeeming themselves. The NY Times has been doing a good job creating quality content specifically for online, and is not merely using their website as an archive of their newspaper. Of course, they are also hemorrhaging money, so we’ll see how long they can keep doing this. It’s no secret that large corporations are very resistant to change. It would be interesting to see a newspaper of note take a lesson from the music industry’s failure to adapt, and the subsequent collapse of the larger corporate model. I dream of the day they would announce they are drastically switching up their business model to adapt to the market place changes. No more paper issues after current subscriptions run out, a switch to an innovative and user-friendly online format, automatic downloads to kindles, a reduced staff focusing on quality writing for the internet, subscription possibilities for niche topics, free mainstream content, etc.