Record Cartels - view from outside the Napster crowd

[TankGirl]

Originally posted by Mazer
The whole business is backwards. The record companies should be bidding for music contracts and the musicians should be hiring the executives for their services. But record companies don't compete against each other, musicians do. We have Billboard magazine to thank for that, and Casey Kasem isn't much help either. So what if the song isn't on the top 100, I still listen to it anyway. Competetion is good for business but not for art.

Maybe the biggest problem is that record companies invest too much money promoting plastic discs with recordings of canned performances rather than the artists themselves. They invest in the product instead of the people. It would probably be easier to sell a catalogue of ten thousand musicians than an inventory of ten billion CD's, but the record companies don't see it that way. They prefer prerecorded songs because they're easier to control.

- tg