Brian's Brain

We knew the music business was in serious trouble, due to a combination of consumer disregard for copyright and a preference for single-track purchases over more lucrative-to-studio full-album acquisitions, but I had no idea the situation would get so bad, so fast. Just as it became the first label to dispense with digital rights management a year ago, EMI continues to lead the music industry into a very different-looking future (the cemetery, perhaps?) by discarding any pretense of trying to garner revenue for its formidable content archive.

Instead, the company is opening wide the doors to its website, offering free downloads of its artists' material, hoping to become a one-stop portal shop for consumers (in spite of the inevitable fact that the DRM-free content will rapidly also appear on Bittorrent), and banking its uncertain future on advertising-clogged HTML that earns revenue one click and one eyeball at a time. Any musician or band that's unwilling to go along with EMI's new strategy can opt out, but it'll then need to cut a deal with another studio or find some other way to get its material to the public.

EMI's decision is an enormous risk, but perhaps it's better to live or die in one master stroke of transformation versus slow-but-sure death by a thousand cuts? I'll be very curious to see how, and how quickly, the other labels respond to EMI's "Hail Mary pass". And Apple, Walmart and the other online and brick-and-mortar retailers must also be in severe shock right now; a substantial revenue stream for them all has just disappeared.

*Ok, I'm done now. ;-) But once again, the most tempting spoofs are the ones that could be true, right? And yes, I know that advertising's also EDN's business model. With one key difference, though: advertising's always been EDN's business model.