"If you look at what's going on, it's the first time that there has ever been an industry impacted by illegal activities," says UMG chairman/CEO Doug Morris. "Thousands and thousands of jobs have been lost, and it is an untold story that no one has rallied behind. It is one of the saddest things I have ever seen."

I think I might have had a ground floor look at "the saddest thing"... when Herb A and Jerry M saw the writing on the wall and sold A&M to Polygram, who laid off virtually everybody decent at A&M, then shockingly had Herb escorted off the premises of the business that he had built by security, then were promptly sold to Universal, etc... It's highly disingenuous of Morris to wring his hands in this way. He, of all people. UMG has been gobbling up and destroying record companies like starving wolves for close to twenty years, moving the business in exactly the wrong direction. Where music, especially pop music needs to be nimble, mobile, and unbogged-down by layers of frightened corporate middle management, we instead have lumbering behemoths like UMG, reporting to stockholders who know nor care nothing for music, or anything, really, other than quarterly growth statements. To keep the quarterly growth statements growing in a shrinking market, they lay off more good people, sell more valuable real estate, massage accounting, delay payments to their artists and subcontractors, over charge their customers, and eventually will seal their own doom, leaving the door open for a newer, lower-cost renaissance of popular culture.

The difficult thing at this particular moment, beyond the frankly evil stupidity of corpothink in the music business is the hegemony of big radio. because theyre essentially the only game in town, they have the ability to control public access to music. Thus, they can charge "consultant fees" in the hundreds of thousands for chart positions, making the economics virtually impossible for smaller labels. The last FCC deregulation put the nail in the coffin, probably for good, as far as commercial FM radio goes. So, it's a round of blackmail, extortion, and the like, and only a wider range of choices, like XM, or Internet radio, or small low-wattage local stations, or a combination of all of the above will ever break the back of these frankly sinister entities.

Yes, the major labels are dinosaurs, and noone would grieve particularly if they were struck by a meteor, but without more controls over monopolised radio, and more serious enforcement of payola laws, and more alternatives to radio the situation is likely to continue to be rather bleak in the near future.

db