Disintermediation

In yet another post on the state of the music industry, Steve Lawson muses on the oft-repeated statistic that file-sharers spend more on music.

Are we part of the ongoing viability of their music practice, or not? There are lots of ways of being that, far beyond blunt figures about where we get hold of particular recordings from (and a whole lot of material on BitTorrent isn’t available to buy anywhere anyway), but are we part of the healthy future for disintermediated music, or are we just trying to see how much we can get away with? Cos I’ve got no interest in the people in the latter group… Music has given me far too much in my life not to want to give back…

What we don’t know (and there may not be any way of telling) is the extent to filesharing changes not just how people will spend on music, but what sort of music they will buy. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that they’re spending less on heavily-promoted “mainstream” music much of which doesn’t live up to the hype. But instead they’re spending more on artists not signed to the major labels and their subsidiaries who don’t benefit from huge promotional budgets. Quite a bit of this is direct sales from artists, which frequently don’t show up in official statistics; the disintermediation of which Steve Lawson speaks.

If this is true, it would explain why so many of those who shout the loudest against the evils of filesharing are not artists, but marketing types and execs who have the most to lose from disintermediation. These people always claim to speak on behalf of artists, even though independent artists can speak for themselves. Is this just because nobody really cares if the likes or record pluggers have to seek alternative employment?

No that I condone people who download huge amounts of music without any intention of paying for a note of it. But I’ve never bought into the argument that the sky is falling, and the only way the “creative industries” can be saved is to give the big labels and studios unchecked power to shut down any parts of the internet they don’t like. As Bloom.fm’s Oleg Formenko said on Twitter, piracy is what happens when there are no legal alternatives at prices the market is willing to pay.