Lily Allen agrees with 'docile pop rubbish' attack

Someone on Twitter said the new Lily Allen work was "docile pop rubbish".

You might expect Allen to object; instead, she agreed:

Lily responded to the claims by agreeing that her label has forced her hand for most of her comeback so far: "What you've heard so far, yes. All I can do is do my best, the labels and the radio stations won't play the better stuff."

She then teased her new album by telling him: "Keep the faith."

Which is charmingly honest, but does raise the question of why she's doing work that's so poor the label will get behind it in the first place.

That's an odd question to be asking, although one that we probably should be asking more often.

Johnny Borrell: When you give life lemons, someone will make lemonade

You know how you can tell when your record sales are really bad? It's when your label stops trying to talk up your record, and joins in the gales of laughter.

I wouldn't normally plonk down an entire press release, but Stiff Records' giggling at Johnny Borrell's sales deserves to be read in full:

Stiff Records is proud to announce first week sales figures for its latest album – Johnny Borrell's 'Borrell 1' – of 594.

'Borrell 1' is the début solo LP from the former Razorlight vocalist and is the first new album on the highly prolific Stiff Records since 2007.

That last album was the multi million-selling two-volume set, '30 Years Of Stiff Records' (although admittedly that was a free cover-mount with 'The Independent on Sunday').

"First week sales of 594 makes 'Borrell 1' the 15,678th best selling album of the year to date," comments a Stiff spokesperson. "So far we've achieved 0.00015% sales of Adele's '21' – and 0.03% sales of this week's No. 1 album from Jahmene Douglas – so we feel like it's all to play for as we move into the all-important week two."

“We might even break the Top 100.”

'Borrell 1' is out now on Stiff Records. If they're dead, we'll sign them.

You could almost feel sorry for Borrell - after all, it's unlikely Stiff warned Borrell that failing to sell any copies beyond his immediate family would result in public humiliation; and, as we know, Borrell does have a precious self-image which might struggle with knowing there are another fifteen and half thousand more popular albums than his. This year alone.

Johnny Borrell is people, after all. And, let's face it, while he might make terrible albums, it's not his fault that someone at Stiff - which is now just a tiny outcrop of Universal - decided to spend money on releasing it.

And given that marketing and promotion is what the major label is meant to provide in return for its cut, this is a bit like an inept surgeon mocking the dead guy on his operating table.

On the other hand: 594. I know Razorlight were growing ranker than a week-gone bobcat left to fester in an open drain towards the end, but were there no curious fans left by the end?

[Thanks for the tip to @curiousiguana]

iRadio: Can you feel the excitement?

Can you hear the world, holding its breath, for the launch of Apple iRadio?

Nope, me neither.

The sheer lack of people who say "you know what I wish? I wish I could stream music through the iTunes interface" has always been noticeable.

It's likely that Apple will make the service a success, simply through plonking the iRadio button on homescreens of devices, and maybe there'll be something to the service unveiled today that makes it essential, or desirable, but it's hard to see the problem with music streaming that needs Apple to solve it.

AllThingsD tries to describe what we can expect:

[It] should function like an enhanced version of Pandora — that is, it will be a free streaming music service that gives users more control of their songs than standard Web radio, but less than full on-demand services like Spotify.

That's... uh, clear. The idea is that the tracks you hear will be half-determined by you telling it what you want to hear, and half it scanning your iTunes history. You know that time you bought the Crazy Frog to burn onto a CD for a joke for your brother? THAT will be the guiding light that iRadio seizes on to build your playlists. That, and the thirty unplayed episodes of OpenSouceSex.

Even so, I'll bet Spotify and Pandora are feeling uncomfortable this morning.

Interestingly, Apple have only just managed to pull Sony on board. Are the majors happy?

The majors publishers had looked like they were going to be the holdout because Apple initially offered to pay them a rate of 4.1% of its advertising revenue, while the publishers had been withdrawing digital rights from the U.S. performance rights organizations BMI and ASCAP because they wanted higher rates. BMG, Sony/ATV, UMPG and Warner/Chappell executives had privately said they were seeking rates of 10%-15% of iRadio’s advertising revenue. But when Apple agreed to a 10% rate, Warner/Chappell last week signed the deal and now so has Sony/ATV.

Getting more than double Apple wanted to pay. That's quite a strong move by the majors. Let's hope they don't do that thing where they suddenly get insanely greedy.

While publishers will get 10% of revenue, they privately are calling this an introductory rate, meaning that after the iRadio service establishes itself, they expect that rate to increase. Likewise, they also say they expect Pandora to match the deals they are doing now with Apple.

"We won't hold our ground when we have the advantage and Apple really needs us for launch. Oh, no. What we'll do, right, is wait until the service is established, and carrying itself along under its own sheer weight of numbers. At that point, when we've got massive sums of cash flowing in from Apple, we'll be in a really strong position to threaten to refuse to take that money any more unless they give us more. At the same time, with Apple crushing Pandora into near-obscurity, that'd be exactly the moment to ask Pandora to give us more of the less money it's making. Genius plan, eh, guys?"

Bookmarks: Napster, iTunes and beyond

In the Wisconsin Law Review, Mike Masnick explains why the war on Napster didn't only fail to stop piracy, but also put the brakes on innovative new companies working in online music. In short: Had the RIAA been less keen to kill Napster, perhaps Apple wouldn't have ended up stealing their business:

This should have been obvious from the fact that people would flock to these new services, yet failed to show up to the record labels’ own attempts to innovate or provide something new. However, as soon as any service showed any kind of promise, even if “licensed,” the labels would seek to kill the golden goose by claiming that the rates were unfair, and the innovators were making money unfairly off the backs of the copyright holders (by which they meant the labels, not the musicians, of course).

Take, for example, the brief heyday of music video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. For a year or two, the recording industry fell head over heels in love with these games, because people were playing them quite a bit, and they were (briefly) willing to pay a slight premium to get access to music from well-known bands and musicians. Rather than build on that, the industry did two things: it focused all of its attention on those kinds of games, absolutely flooding the market and making people get sick of the game genre, and demanded much higher royalties.

The viewpoint seemed to be that there could be almost no benefits for the innovators. Nearly all of the benefits had to accrue to the labels, or it would be seen as a problem. In fact, the one exception that got through was iTunes, and that was quickly seen as a “problem” by the labels, even as it was dragging them, kicking and screaming, into the marketplace for digital music. The view is one of an extreme zero-sum world, where if someone else is benefiting, it must mean that the labels were losing out. They didn’t even hide this view of the world. Doug Morris, then head of Universal Music (now head of Sony Music) explained to a Wired reporter that investing in new innovations that weren’t paying money upfront meant that “someone, somewhere is taking advantage of you.” As laid out in the article, Morris was uninterested in technology, and didn’t even know how to hire a competent technology person, so his focus was on making sure everyone paid up immediately. Anyone making money in the music world without first paying a massive cut were dubbed “thieves.”

RIAA feeling the pinch

As the major labels slide towards the exit, times are getting tougher for their cartel organisation. TorrentFreak has looked at the RIAA's finances:

In its most recent filing the RIAA lists 72 people on the payroll compared to 117 two years earlier. In total these employees earned $12.7 million of which nearly 25% went into the pockets of the top two executives.

The top earner in the year ending March 2011 was Mitch Bainwol (CEO) with $1.75 million a year with a working week of 50 hours. Current CEO Cary Sherman (then President) came in second with $1.37 million.

Other high income employees were Neil Turkewitz (EVP International), Steve Marks (General Counsel) and Mitch Glazier (Public Policy & Industry Relations) with $696,036, $675,528 and $599,661 respectively.

They're still doing nicely; and the cash paid to lobbyists is still high - USD2.3million spunked away on trying to distort the legislative process.

But the good times are coming to an end as the money dries up:

The total revenue in the latest filing is $29.1 million, down from $51.35 million two years earlier.

Given the main business of the RIAA has been to stop piracy, and its success has been markedly poor, is it any wonder that the cash is draining away?

Thank you kindly, and goodnight, EMI

After decades of swimming through the sea swallowing smaller labels, EMI has now, definitively, been swallowed itself. BBC News reports:

UK music firm EMI has said it will sell its recorded music unit for £1.2bn ($1.9bn) to Universal Music.

Reports have suggested that the other half of EMI's business - the lucrative music publishing unit - will go to a Sony-led consortium for more than $2bn.

Universal buying EMI is a bit like a bloke with lung disease buying an organ from a heavy smoker with a bad cough, and should probably be viewed as a nice rationalisation to make it easier for whoever ends up buying Universal.

Some artists, at least, welcome their new corporate overlords:

"I particularly welcome the fact that EMI will once again be owned by people who really do have music in their blood," said Rolling Stones singer Sir Mick Jagger.

The manager of Coldplay also welcomed Universal.

"They have assembled the most talented group of executives in the industry today and their success speaks for itself," Dave Holmes said.

This should not be seen as fawning over the new bosses in a desperate bid to keep in with them as there becomes less competition to sign clapped-out behemoths to record labels.

EMI's likely buyers

It's looking more and more likely that EMI will be split into two as the auction continues.

Warner Music will probably pick up the recorded music part of the company, with BMG Rights Management - a 50-50 Bertlesmann/ KKR group - taking the bit that makes money.

Ah, yes, KKR are private equity - that's been something of a success for EMI in the past, hasn't it?

Warners are expected to kill the EMI brand in America - or at least finish off the parts that are still twitching following Bungling Hands' time in charge - but might retain it in the UK. It wouldn't be too surprising if some form of EMI America label clung on at the edges, just to play to the sentimental amongst the people who still buy records.

Sean Parker: Why would you sign for a label?

Sean Parker - who went from founding Napster to, erm, popping up at the only fairly creepy Bilderberg crypto-capitalist bunfight last year - was on-stage at this week's Web 2.0 summit, and amongst the names dropped and scores settled, he said this:

He also criticized record labels for their bureaucracy and inability to adapt, saying that thanks to digital distribution services like MySpace and Spotify, bands no longer need to pay a third party to get their music into the ears of the masses. At one point during the interview, Parker said, “I’m not actually sure why you would sign up with a record label. Unless you're desperate for money, or you're on skid-row, and you've got a heroin problem."

Not entirely sure even that's true - even when the majors were powerful, signing to a record label for the money would have been like a cow striking a deal with a butcher to secure her future.

It's questionable, though, if a man who has invested so strongly in Spotify might want to be quite so rude about record labels in public, though - whatever pipe the music of the future flows through, the majors do still control a big chunk of the archive. Pointing out to them that they're probably not going to be part of growing that archive is only going to make them want to jack up the value they drag out of what they do control.

[Thanks to Michael M]

Who will buy EMI?

Reuters suggesting no end of likely suitors for EMI, including Sony and Universal. If either of them take over the company, we'd be one step closer to the inevitable single-major world. It'd be a sad day, but at least it'd make things easier for the RIAA.

However, there are other organisations kicking the wheels:

Citigroup is keeping its options open as to EMI. The auction could include separate offers for EMI's music publishing and music recording businesses, or an offer for the entire company, three of the sources said.

The interested parties have signed confidentiality agreements to get access to EMI's financial information so that they can decide whether to put in bids for the company, which are expected in August, the sources said.

Potential buyers including Access, MacAndrews & Forbes, Sony and Platinum Equity have talked to investment banks about financing an EMI buyout, these people said.

Banks including Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and UBS AG have expressed willingness to finance a potential deal, two of the sources said. All the banks declined to comment for this story.

Suggestions that the winner will get to ride Damon Albarn like a pony could not be confirmed at time of publication.

Google should buy the music industry, says Glynn Moody

There's an interesting bit on Techdirt and opendotdotdot pointing out that Google, rather than being disgusted by the labels, could actually buy them. Without breaking a sweat.

It's not a totally original thought - at an In The City at the end of the last century I remember hearing someone pointing out that Bill Gates could buy all four major labels should he wish (assuming the competition laws would let him). Maybe he should have done - that might have given the Zune some leverage over the iPod.

Still, Glynn Moody thinks the thought again:

But that throwaway comment also raises another interesting idea: how about if Google *did* buy the music industry? That would solve its licensing problems at a stroke. Of course, the anti-trust authorities around the world would definitely have something to say about this, so it might be necessary to tweak the idea a little.

How about if a consortium of leading Internet companies -- Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Baidu, Amazon etc. -- jointly bought the entire music industry, and promised to license its content to anyone on a non-discriminatory basis?

EMI and Warners are both up for sale right now, it's true; but it's hard to picture Google and Microsoft setting their differences aside long enough to employ Josh Groban. Nor is it clear why Baidu would want to sink its money into Western labels.

But it's a lovely idea. Unworkable, but lovely.

Spotify makes free marginallyless attractive

Spotify has tried to please the labels by cutting the hours on offer for its Free Users from 20 hours to 10, and introduced an arbitrary rule meaning you can only play a track five times. (Presumably, since the system struggles to recognise a track that appears on an album and a compilation, some tracks there might be a workaround that doesn't involve AudioHijack Pro).

The Guardian's Charles Arthur is very good on the real story:

To put it bluntly: Spotify is cutting the amount of free music people can listen to in order to please the American labels with which it is agonisingly negotiating to try to get permission to launch in the US. The fact is that the labels there – and for that matter in Europe – don't like Spotify allowing people to listen to so much music for free (even though Spotify pays them the stipulated amount per track, whether the customer is listening for free or on a paid subscription).
[...]
That overlooks the reality, which is that the internet's openness means that if you can't get your music for a low cost in one place, then you'll find someone ignoring the rules and offering it for free somewhere else.

It also ignores the reality about the effect Spotify has on digital revenues for the music business. It's the second single largest source of digital music revenue for labels in Europe, according to IFPI's latest report. And last week, Billboard magazine reported that countries where Spotify is licensed saw an average digital revenue growth rate of 43% in 2010. By contrast, neighbouring countries – including Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Portugal and Switzerland – saw only 9.3% digital growth last year. That's based on IFPI data too.

Spotify insist the move isn't about trying to transition free users to paid, nor to cut back on costs. Indeed, in its blog, Spotify stresses that if this was the idea it wouldn't really have much effect:

The changes we’re having to make will mainly affect heavier Spotify Free and Open users, as most of you use Spotify to discover music – on average over 50 new tracks per month, even after a year. Plus, the average user won’t reach the limit on plays for 7 out of 10 tracks, after a year of using Spotify. For those of you using Spotify to find new tracks to enjoy and share with friends, these changes shouldn’t get in the way of you doing that. Rest assured that we’ll continue to bring you the biggest and most diverse music catalogue available.

They might as well have called it Project Empty Gesture To Stop Freaking Out The Old Guys.

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Wayne Rosso

If you can get past the hanging-it-on-John-Lennon's-birthday part, Wayne Rosso's summation of the problems facing music labels in The Dream Is Over.

It's not piracy, it's their own obstinacy that is going to destroy them:

There will be no new players of significance to enter the business. Investors don’t want to entertain the remotest possibility of funding any start-up that deals with music, no matter how clever and innovative. As one major media venture firm told me a few months ago, they’re tired of writing cheques for big advances to record labels. Not to mention the huge legal fees that start-ups have to spend in order to get licensed, a process that takes at least a year (for no apparent reason, I might add).

Jay-Z and the dinosaurs

Jay-Z apparently not as smart as we're lead to believe:

Rap icon JAY-Z was stunned when he first took over as president of Def Jam Records in 2004 - because the company's top men were living in the past.

Really, Jay-Z? That surprised you?

The hitmaker, who went on to sign Rihanna, Ne-Yo and Young Jeezy to the label, couldn't believe that some of the players in the organisation hadn't had a big hit since the 1980s.

You couldn't believe that?

He tells Rolling Stone magazine, "You had record executives who've been sitting in their offices for 20 years because of one act: 'But that's the guy who signed Motley Crue!' (I was like), 'Seriously? That was f**king 25 years ago.'

And that surprised you?

Next week: Jay-Z incensed to discover that Heinz releases loads of new brands every year which fail straight away. "There's this one guy still there because he came up with Big Soup. Sure, it had chunks in, but that was fucking ages ago."

Thom Yorke sees grim times ahead for majors

Thom Yorke is advising young folk to steer clear of deals with big labels, reports Tim Ross in the London Evening Standard:

Yorke, 41, who made his fortune from six albums recorded with EMI, has told talented young musicians to make it on their own without the help of massive recording contracts.

He offers the pessimistic advice in a rare interview for a new school textbook in which he is asked what advice he would give teenagers who wanted to make a difference with their music.

Yorke claims the mainstream music industry is dying and that this will be “no great loss to the world” before telling aspiring musicians not to tie themselves to the “sinking ship”.

Yorke suggests it will be “only a matter of time — months rather than years — before the music business establishment completely folds”. After recording six albums with EMI, Radiohead split acrimoniously from the label when they failed to agree new terms.

Bit confused as to why Ross feels this is "pessimistic advice" - he seems to be assuming that signing your work and life and kidneys over to a badly-organised corporation which will screw you when times are good and can't work out how to operate when times are bad is a positive good.

Saying there are ways that don't involve you having to file receipts with an office in LA sounds like optimistic advice to me.

Record companies still face price-fixing allegations

The American courts - Second Circuit Court of Appeals, to be precise - have reinstated a class action against the majors alleging price-fixing in the early days of download sales in the US.

The complainants point to how downloads were the same price across the two favoured legal services; the defendants insist that's just how markets work. The case had been tossed, but now it's back, and heading for a proper hearing.

Price-fixing? The record labels? It's not like they don't have form for it.

Unwanted formats: CMX, anybody?

Given the way new formats have been launched and failed like flying ants emerging into the daylight inside an aviary, you'd have thought that anyone at a record company meeting who suggested launching yet another mystifyingly-named, undemanded format would find themselves shoving their office gonks and mugs into a binliner rather than being given a budget and small team.

Not so, though, as the majors have cooked up a new, exciting, new, exciting, new, exciting format that will - they believe - stop the decline of album sales:

Sony, Warner, Universal and EMI are putting the finishing touches to an album format that will give music fans a computerised version of the sleeve notes that come as standard with a CD, including lyrics and artwork, and videos.

They're calling it CMX. Perhaps to persuade confused grandparents to buy one when the little 'uns have asked for a BMX. Or perhaps because they're hoping it'll be as successful as the MSX computers were back in the 80s.

One senior record label insider said: “Apple at first told us that they were not interested, but now they have decided to do their own, in case ours catches on.

“Ours will be a file that you click on, it opens and it would have a totally brand-new look, with a launch page and all the different options. When you click on it you’re not just going to get the ten tracks, you’re going to get the artwork, the video and mobile products.”

Thank god for that - I would have hated it if it didn't have mobile products.

Is it just me, or does that "senior record label insider" sound like he or she has been to a couple of meetings where someone's stood up and run through a Powerpoint, and everybody has come away really excited but nobody quite understands what it is. "There's this thing with a brand new look and all the different options"? That could be anything, couldn't it?

The main weakness - beside the utter pointlessness of the idea - is that people aren't buying albums online because they can get the tracks they want without having to buy tracks they don't like. It's like the major labels have seen people getting upset at finding flaming brown paper bags of shit left on their doorstep, and decided that people might enjoy it a bit more if, before it was set alight, the shit was put into a gift bag with a ribbon on it.

Apple: The cocktail nobody wants

The drop off of interest in albums - and in particular, being forced to buy filler tracks because albums used to come in a specific size, and that's the way it should be, dammit - has worried the RIAA labels. And, naturally, rather than try and adapt to the way technology has changed their business, the response is to try and find ways to pretend its still 1972.

Apple, bless them, are helping, conspiring on a project with the supersecret name Cocktail. What's cocktail? The FT explains:

Apple is working with the four largest record labels to stimulate digital sales of albums by bundling a new interactive booklet, sleeve notes and other interactive features with music downloads, in a move it hopes will change buying trends on its online iTunes store.

Ah yes. Sleeve notes. That'll make it worth paying for 12 tracks when you really only want the decent song.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to the labels that if they want to sell songs in batches of a dozen, or a half-dozen, the easiest thing to do would be to make all those songs worth having. No, no: Let's give people a little essay about the songs they don't want. That'll reel 'em in.

Apple, clearly, don't view this as lobbing a bunch of old rubbish into the deal in the hope of flogging a few extra units:

“It’s not just a bunch of PDFs,” said one executive. “There’s real engagement with the ancillary stuff.”

Oh, yes. I can't get enough of that, erm, ancillary stuff.

It doesn't make track seven any better if you're able to listen to it while reading that the middle vocalist thanks God for his help on it.

Apple wants to make bigger purchases more compelling by creating a new type of interactive album material, including photos, lyric sheets and liner notes that allow users to click through to items that they find most interesting. Consumers would be able to play songs directly from the interactive book without clicking back into Apple’s iTunes software, executives said.

So... instead of simply buying the tracks you want, you spend more, get some sort of proprietorial locked-up thing which you can work your way through to find a way to hear the tracks you want. I really hope we can also queue up to buy these at the Apple Store, perhaps in the rain, as it doesn't sound inconvenient enough already.

Maybe this is why the project is called Cocktail, presumably after the Tom Cruise movie which also made anyone near it want to smash things until the pain went away.

Irish ISPs face legal action from majors

With Eircom having folded and told the big record labels that it would do whatever they asked of it, if you're looking for an ISP in Ireland and want one which puts your privacy ahead of the interests of international companies, you've still got a choice.

For now. Because the lawyer-happy music industry is now dragging BT Ireland and UPC to court to try and force them to introduce a 'three strikes' rule. To be fair, the majors have no choice but to behave in this manner, as part of their agreement with Eircom was that they'd try to ensure their competitors also had a three strikes rule so as not to put them at a competitive disadvantage.

Funny that, isn't it? The record companies try to tell us that three strikes is in everyone's interests, and that most people would welcome this sort of rule, and yet Eircom clearly feel that being the only company with three strikes on the book would cause customers to shun it to a worrying degree.

IRMA - which is the RIAA pretending to be interested in Ireland - are pressing ahead despite increasing evidence that throwing people off the internet is going to fall foul of European human rights legislation. It's not often I feel sorry for BT, but having to go to court to try and argue why it doesn't really want to find itself in court in Strasbourg seems a little unfair.

Giving away what you used to call so precious

Jamie mentioned this in a comment on the White Lies story, and I think it's worthy of a bit more attention: Orlowski on Spotify and the mystery of the music business suddenly embracing free:

The business looks down on this free and easy access to its assets quite understandably. Because if it's all free, then investment in making sound recordings will evaporate. Only fools invest in businesses which aren't going to make any money. You're following, I hope.

So to compete with businesses which don't make any money and give away free music, they're backing a business which doesn't make any money, and gives away music for free. It's genius.

[...]

The more Spotify grows, increasing its music catalogue as it goes along, the fewer recordings you have to buy. The music you want to hear and the playlists are "in the cloud", for free. If you could be assured the free lemonade would never stop, you may as well get rid of the CDs you already have now, and will never have to be pay for a sound recording again.

The rival lemonade stands don't have to pay for the music they offer, while Spotify does. So keeping the Spotify tap turned on costs the music business an enormous amount of money. Last week, at the Great Escape music event in Brighton, we learned that Spotify has very little realistic prospect of making any money either.

The labels, you see, own 30% of Spotify through equity investments, so while it's a third party, a third of it isn't.

So, having built Spotify - and spent just five grand on marketing - how are they going to make money?

[In converstaion with Music Ally's Paul Brindley, Spotify's Daniel] Ek's three big come-ons for the paid service were social features, a download service that interoperated with your phone or iPod, and exclusives.

Hmm. Really? Is that going to make anyone start to hand over money for something being given away for free?

It turns out there's a plan B:

"We want to hand out consumer data we have to give to labels so they can target consumers better and communicate better."

Ah. Spammify. No wonder the labels were happy to put cash in for chunks of Spotify - there's no need for that tiresome (alleged) RIAA-requesting-CBS-for-LastFM data if you own a chunk of the servers where the information is being held.

The trouble is, as Orlowski points out, what you get is a lot of data about people who like free music. Do the labels really need to find out a bunch of stuff about people who are setting the market value of individual tracks closer and closer to zero? It's like filling your little black book with the names of people who've told you "not if you're the last man on Earth", isn't it?

Music industry bail-out blasted

There's quite a few people suggesting that the government should come up with a way of helping the record companies in their hour of need. Mostly, those people are from the music industry.

TechRadar has been talking to Andrew Dubber, who entertainingly trots through the arguments against changing the law, and slapping taxes on broadband, and generally allowing Guy Hands to dictate what's going to happen.

Dubber is part of New Music Strategies and (deep breath) Arts and Humanities Research Council Knowledge Transfer Fellow in Online Music and Radio Innovation and a Senior Lecturer in the Music Industries at Birmingham City University. So he knows what he's talking about:

One of those things is that the record companies aren't the music industry. "The music industry is a vast, diverse ecology with lots of different people doing different stuff, but the record companies have managed to persuade the mainstream media to call them the music industry - which is a bit like the lions demanding to be called the zoo," he laughs.

One of Dubber's main concerns is the sheer amount of stuff that you just can't hear anymore:

Dubber describes how, in 2006, he asked Universal Music - one of the world's biggest record labels - how much of their music was currently available for sale. The answer? Two percent. Ninety-eight percent of Universal's music was locked in a vault somewhere.

Things have improved in the last few years thanks to iTunes, but the amount of music available is still the tip of an iceberg. "There's no incentive for them to release it, because it's not popular enough to be commercially viable - and because there's no danger of them losing the rights to it, why bother hurrying? If it was out there and in the public domain, they could say, look, here it is. Use it, listen to it, love it, sample it, rework it, do what you like. But it's a massive store of our cultural heritage [that] is just locked away because it's commercially expedient for it not to be released."

It's an entertaining read - thanks to Russell C for bringing the piece to our attention.