Posted 3:00 PM by Dave Allen

More on the Billboard article.......

Hi Dave,

Great to hear from you. Things are fine back in lil ol London town - it's nice to be back in our old house - fortunately we kept it rented out, so coming back was fairly easy.
I've been consulting too - it's quite interesting actually and I could almost make a living out of it, although it's not very satisfying long term.
Glad you approve of my response to Mr White, I'm happy for you to reproduce it although it's rather ill tempered and there are some missing words and stuff because I did get a bit hot under the collar!

Do keep in touch,

all the best,

Jeremy

Jeremy Silver
MEDIACLARITY

Phone/Fax:+44 (0)208 933 3781
Mobile:+44 (0)776 418 8898

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Gerd Leonhard
>> Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2002 10:10 PM
>> To: Virtualaw@aol.com;
>> Subject: Re: pho: Timothy White Takes the Labels to Task
>>
>> With all due respect to Timothy, this has got be one of the most pathetic "I
>> told you so", chest-beating and self-serving articles on Digital Music I have
>> ever seen. "...imagine the other ways that the $4 billion lost on online
>> music ventures might have been spent: for example, on salaries for seasoned
>> employees....(Timothy says)" oh yes, there haven't been enough 'seasoned'
>> executives with high salaries that are coasting on stand-by in this business.
>>
>> "Companies seeking to avoid fair play and honest obligations...." ????? I
>> mean, REALLY, which side of this business are you talking about ? Internet
>> start-ups and tech companies hardly come to MY mind first with that
>> description...
>>
>>God it must be nice to be in that ivory tower of yours.

>>Gerd Leonhard

-----Original Message-----


On 3/7/02 2:53 AM, "Jeremy Silver" wrote:

> I absolutely agree with Gerd's indignation. Members of this list should be up
> in arms over Mr White's appallingly reactionary piece of self-important fluff.
>
> Mr White emerges as a true luddite along with so many others for whom the
> fashionable mantra of the moment seems to be the web is a waste of time. The
> fact that consumers are voting with their feet to the tune of 1bn downloads a
> month from p2p operators seems to be an irrelevance to these people. To Mr
> White, that is "the middle-class larceny of large-scale online bootlegging via
> CD burning or other means" and "should be prosecuted". OK so Billboard's
> editor in chief is now leading the charge with the thought police and plans to
> enter every music consumer's home and bring prosecutions! Fantastic - have at
> it Mr White! Meanwhile of course, this fellow, who is holier than absolutely
> everyone, spares nobody in this because the labels are just as much at fault
> because their subscription services "are more likely calculated to increase
> corporate ownership of the tracks than extend services to fans". Well, I agree
> with the last part but what does the first part mean - any guesses?
>
> Mr White seems to be of the belief that technology is the devil's work, has
> distracted the industry from its righteous pursuits and is completely
> irrelevent to the concerns of music consumers. Right.
>
> It's also worth noting that Mr White takes the supposed $4bn invested online
> as quoted in the OC&C report and seems to blame the conventional music
> business for wasting money investing online while not accepting "the basic
> cost of doing business". This is a complete and astonishing misreading. Much
> of that investment was not made by music companies - as we know! It was made
> by VCs who would never dream of investing that sort money in conventional
> music business models. Other substantial chunks of that money, were invested
> by the Media Conglomerate owners of Record companies - not the companies
> themselves. Remember Mr White, it was Bertelsmann Group, not BMG that invested
> in Napster and it was Vivendi Paris not Universal's E Lab's who acquired
> MP3.com. Or have you forgotten the importance that you have been stressing on
> the music companies retaining their autonomy within their corporate groupings.
>
> How depressing that a leading thinker in the music business should choose to
> join the ranks of the President of News Corps, Peter Chernin in bleating
> "There is no new media. There is no new paradigm" . The irony of this is that
> those of us who have been working in this space for more than five minutes,
> more like nine years in my case, have been arguing for the need for
> integration, for proper use of the internet as an environment for
> distribution, communication and collaboration - not merely a new medium in
> isolation, but as a complementary element to enhance exisiting businesses and
> which extend business models. It was, I recall, the Merchant Bankers and the
> 21 year old Harvard MBA's who chorussed on about the "paradigm shift".
>
> The period of web activity that we have just experienced, has seen more
> innovation, more experimentation and more market research, than could have
> ever have been paid for by a million merchant bankers or media corporations.
> The body of knowledge, experience and insights that have been gained will, I
> believe, enrich all of us in years to come. It is a sad reflection of their
> ossified condition, that members of old media businesses take advantage of
> their self-created prominence in media channels that they control (no self
> interest here is there?) and take such smug pride in sniping during the low
> point of an evolutionary cycle. Most music industry executives that I speak to
> these days, believe fundamentally that the old music business model is about
> to collapse. They see around them the evidence that the total "melt down" with
> OC&C predict is starting very rapdily to occur. They increasingly believe that
> major record companies will be shrunk and have less power in years to come and
> that more vertically integrated businesses (like artist management companies)
> will become more powerful and ultimately more profitable.
>
> So the wheel will revolve again, and some of that profitability will
> undoubtedly come from digital technology. It has already changed our
> experiences immensely (look at this email list for a start - the global
> village in action on a daily basis) and will continue to do so - in my opinion
> to the benefit of musicians, artists, writers, consumers and smart business
> folk all over the world. Unfortunately for Mr White, he seems to be defending
> a world-view that nobody ever subscribed to - except perhaps him - in his own
> self-created ivory tower.

> Jeremy Silver
> MEDIACLARITY
>
> Phone/Fax:+44 (0)208 933 3781
> Mobile:+44 (0)776 418 8898
>