Ian Gillan in The Sun

Interesting interview with Deep Purple, in, of all places, The Sun. Ian Gillan says some predictably rude things about Ritchie Blackmore (“I was brilliant and he was a tw*t”), and doesn’t think much of Blackmore’s Night. But he also has some telling things to say about the music business. On downloading, for instance:

It’s short-sighted. They should have embraced the digital revolution. All the creative people I knew in the studios — managers, producers writers — were thrilled when this whole thing came along.

We all had this vision of the great jukebox in the sky; how great it would be to download movies, anything, how great it would be. The industry itself saw this as a threat. Instead of embracing it, they fought it.

I’ve often said that it was a digital revolution is a threat.. to their existing business model that revolved around maximising sales from the smallest possible roster of massively hyped artists. The digital revolution could result in a completely different model; much more of the ‘long tail’ with a huge range of artists playing different styles of music, promoted by electronic word-of-mouth, and a vibrant live scene.

The big media cartels just don’t get it. As Ian Gillan says:

There are a lot of people who have no respect for music.

There was a meeting at AOL/Time-Warner, which a friend of mine was at. And the great Ahmet Ertegun from Atlantic Records — one of the great record company guys, what a history — was summoned because he hadn’t spent his budget for the previous year.

They were going to cut next year’s budget and he was trying explain to them that sometimes he invested it, sometimes he saved it, so he could work on an artist he was nurturing.

Anyway, he was told, just a buy a yacht just spend it. And there were these two blokes who had just joined the board and one said about Ertegun: “Who the f***’s that guy?”

And the other said: “I don’t know, some sort of content provider”. That pretty much summed it up how much interest these mega corporations have.