Why Google Should Buy the Music Industry 472
Glyn Moody writes "According to one story about Google's attempts to launch its own music service, 'the search giant is "disgusted" with the labels, so much so that they are seriously considering following Amazon's lead and launching their music cloud service without label licenses.' So here's a simple solution: Google should just buy the major record labels — all of them. It could afford them — people tend to forget that the music industry is actually relatively small in economic terms, but wields a disproportionate influence with policy makers. Buying them would solve that problem too."
Don't be evil (Score:2, Insightful)
What part of "Don't be evil" do you not understand?
Thats (Score:4, Insightful)
Great idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
You think there are rumblings about monopolistic practices now, imagine if the owned the whole music industry. Plus why would you want to buy the music industry? That would be like buying cattle with mad-cow disease.
This is actually... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Honestly... (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, I wonder about this sometimes. Despite the epic saga which is Microsoft, Bill Gates actually seems like the kind of guy who wants to make the world a bit better (for instance, see Project Tuva). If I was a man with a hundred billion dollars, I'd have no qualms spending half of that to make several very real and important problems in the world simply "go away."
Political backpressure shouldn't be a problem no matter what you do, since with that much cash you could easily buy the government along with whatever else you want to buy.
Re:Great idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Don't be evil (Score:5, Insightful)
What part of "Don't be evil" do you not understand?
If Google would buy one or more of the music labels they would simply refine their definition of 'evil'. Many companies to it every day (and the Google may have already done it once or twice itself).
If Google bought music labels (Score:4, Insightful)
If Google bought music labels - then there is little doubt that Amazon music service, iTunes and other direct Google competitors services would be out of licenses and out of business shortly. Isn't that obvious? What interest would Google have to provide these competing services with creative work licenses? None whatsoever.
Re:Corporate death penalty (Score:2, Insightful)
What makes you think Microsoft, Google and Apple would behave any better?
Wouldn't it be more effective to buy the US Gov? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that the music industry is already grossly overvalued and would not be a wise investment.
The US Government on the other hand that would be a valuable investment if they could just find a way to buy them off in bulk.
Lets do the math.
1 Prez, 1 VP, Chief of Staff, Secretary of state ect, Cabinet lets round that to 65 for ease
100 Senators
435 House of Rep
As of January 2009, a total of 3,200 Fed Judges
So we have about 4,000 monkeys to buy. Per year
Average salary is probably around 180k. So we will offer them 10x the amount per year or 1.8 Million per worker.
For only 7.2 Billion per year I think I could effectively own the entire federal government.
I think google can swing that.
Re:Don't be evil (Score:2, Insightful)
I would say buying the legacy music industry and fixing them would be expressly non-evil?
Re:Wouldn't it be more effective to buy the US Gov (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone weren't already doing just that, I would be scared of that happening.
Re:Thats (Score:4, Insightful)
It's so crazy that it would inevitably lead to anti-trust bullshit and Google would be split into search and a bunch of different record labels. In other words, it wouldn't happen.
This has happened before. (Score:5, Insightful)
Think Sony, made nice hardware for a fair price. Then they started buying "content providers". Turns out the content providers took over and Sony has been going downhill for two decades now.
Google or Amazon buying record labels would ruin Google/Amazon
Free the Bands from the RIAA (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not just approach all bands popular that have due contracts and sign them and start their own less restrictive label and bring change to the industry...
This will cause the Music Industry to Panic and make bands sign very long term contracts with very restrictive conditions which will make bands turn away from any label associated with the RIAA..
Once Google has success things will begin to change... and its highly likely Googles success will also been seen by artists unlike what goes on with the RIAA labels where artists see is the short end of the stick of success..
(Is that coffee I smell... I must be dreaming)
Re:Honestly... (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, I wonder about this sometimes. Despite the epic saga which is Microsoft, Bill Gates actually seems like the kind of guy who wants to make the world a bit better (for instance, see Project Tuva). If I was a man with a hundred billion dollars, I'd have no qualms spending half of that to make several very real and important problems in the world simply "go away."
Political backpressure shouldn't be a problem no matter what you do, since with that much cash you could easily buy the government along with whatever else you want to buy.
Do keep in mind that Bill developed a conscience after departing the helm of Microsoft. Doing good works after being a ruthless business man (to accumulate a vast fortune) is a time-honored tradition, usually something to do with trying to polish a turd .. I mean legacy.
Re:Thats (Score:5, Insightful)
Why buy what is broken?
All Google has to do is BECOME a music label, by offering better contracts, more royalties, better artists rights, world wide reach, world wide digital distribution. Add DRM free any-platform playable formats via a free on-line music locker. Allow you to download to any device having your Google credentials installed, and stop worrying about the piracy. Partner with music stores (remember them?) or Best-Buy type geek stores or Walmart, for burn-to-cd (or stick, or MicroSD) while you wait for those people wanting physical media without doing it themselves.
Sign a few big names, and watch people jump ship from the labels. Artists are just as sick of the Labels as the rest of us.
Few companies have Google's reach. They are about the only company that could do this, but even they would need partners for world wide direct to media outlets. At least until they put up Google Media Kiosks in every mall.
Re:This is actually... (Score:5, Insightful)
A very, very bad idea. Google has enough power over content as it is. I'd hate to see them gain even more. Google already controls the most popular search engine and the most popular video hosting site (at least in the US. I'm not sure about the rest of the world.) Imagine if you could only find, say, music videos as youtube "rentals," or had to use a Google TV box for streaming internet radio. Sure, a lot of those technologies are open right now, and Google's motto is "do no evil," but do you really believe that Google wouldn't be able to lock their content down in an instant if their shareholders demanded it?
I agree with the basic premise of what you're trying to say: Monopolies are generally bad. But I do not agree with all you're saying.
Shareholders cannot simply demand things. Google's duty to its shareholders is to make money, plain and simple. Shareholders have absolutely no reason to demand anything specific of Google if Google is making money, and they would have no ground to stand on making such demands. Google's system is obviously working. They are making money by the metric fucktonne. Why would they drastically alter the way they do business by performing a complete 180-degree turn in their policies and the ideas they've so strongly based themselves upon?
Again, monopolies are generally bad, but Google doesn't have to buy all the major labels. All they need is one. If they buy ONE of the "big four" and start offering sane licensing agreements that the world has been searching for (for both the content distributors AND the content producers), and start allowing their music to embrace this new possibility of distribution called the "Internet" (it's this fancy thing that's been around for a couple decades that none of the record labels like to acknowledge the existence of) other labels will simply have to follow suit or they will very quickly become irrelevant.
Re:Don't be evil (Score:5, Insightful)
It's "Don't be evil, not don't buy evil.
Re:Great idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Thats (Score:3, Insightful)
You'd consider buying a record label because you're buying a catalog of existing recordings, contracts with current artists for their future recordings, and a bunch of employees who know how to do all the marketing and distribution. (Not that you necessarily want them to do exactly what they've been doing before -- but it's a lot easier than hiring them one by one.) Even if it's partly broken, it might be faster and cheaper than starting your own publishing business from scratch.
Worry about the movie and book industries instead (Score:5, Insightful)
The music industry has already lost. They lost it in 1979 when the compact disc was released. At the time, there were no PCs, 650 MB was a huge amount of data that couldn't be stored cheaply by other means, producing a CD required a factory, and strong encryption was hardly possible to implement in a consumer-grade CD player. As soon as the CD-R was invented, it was possible for average users to make cheap lossless copies. When the Internet became popular, all modern music was already digitized; sharing it was just a trivial matter of compression and hosting. You might argue that the current legal framework lets the music industry inflate their prices, but really, it's hard to beat the convenience of being able to download almost any commercially available piece of music imaginable, DRM-free, for around $1 per track. The music industry was the first to be digitized on a large scale, even before the movie and book industries, and are in a relatively weak position as a result.
The movie / TV industry was lucky to have the DVD come out after all those technological innovations, and learned from the music industry's misfortune. Today, the video market is so consumer-unfriendly that one could reasonably argue that piracy gives you a better product with fewer hassles. (If you pirate music, though, you're just a cheapskate.) For example, just try to purchase a movie without DRM, region coding, or unskippable segments. Try to purchase computer or video equipment without Macrovision, region coding, or HDCP. We don't even have a mainstream patent-free video codec. It's all those technological encumbrances that make the movie industry an even greater threat to the future of computing and media consumption than the audio industry ever was.
Surprisingly, the e-book industry is even more technologically backward than the movie industry. In addition to DRM, it also suffers from marketplace fragmentation. The display technology is new, and the handful of hardware manufacturers are as eager to control the distribution mechanism as the content publishers. The stakes are higher, too. If the music and movie industries manage to strangle themselves, we mainly lose a corpus of entertainment. If books are replaced by specialized gadgets with uncopyable, unlendable, unprintable, and remotely erasable e-books, that would be a serious step backwards for humanity.
Re:Thats (Score:5, Insightful)
The libraries aren't broken, that's what Google wants. The good music is stuff that's older and established, and for Google to stream that they have to make a deal with the labels, who aggregate the key rights holders.
Big G could care less about new music, artists have to be found, promoted, and then once they finally get popular they just start their own labels and sell the music themselves. Nobody wants to get into the recording industry now, all of this wrangling is over music that the record companies hold the key distro rights to. Because of utterly destructive copyright extensions in the US, the music business is now 95% about controlling library rights and 5% developing new acts. Occasionally there are co-branding deals with retail outlets a la Paul McCartney and Starbucks [foxnews.com], but these are just for sales, not for distribution, no "big acts" worth their beans ever signs away rights, let alone to a Google.
What does Google know about entertainment promoting? That's what production is now; it isn't just as easy as putting up a ton of music on YouTube, 90% of music promotion is telling people what to like, and Google has shown very little skill at consumer marketing or trendsetting; just because they know how to get millions of people to use free stuff doesn't mean they can figure out how to sell people coolness, hipness or identity. You suggested they market music, and "selling cool" is what marketing music is.
Re:I for one welcome... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm for planning for things like health care provision and military expenditure, bridge building, public goods, all that stuff. But this is about deciding how musicians get paid -- that's what record labels do, they're negotiating for on behalf of the rights holders and royalty beneficiaries.
Do we really want to pay artists through a command economy? Are music consumers really so stupid they need to be "protected" from paying high prices for a CD by a paternalistic super-distributor? I mean, if Google owned "all" of the record labels this would be the result, and if you didn't agree to Google's rates your music would not be sold.
This is just a bad solution to a bad problem, and would make Google the biggest benefactor and advocate of copyright extension. Copyright extension is the problem, solve that.
Re:Don't be evil (Score:5, Insightful)