Music industry vs the rest of the world

I waited a little to write my first post as a guest on this blog as I wanted to post something challenging and interesting. Whether this amounts to that I will have to leave to you!

Who likes Weebl and Bob? If you don’t know them then I suggest you visit the site right away for some very amusing and clever animations. They were the animators of Cadbury’s Creme Egg rip offs of film this year at Easter. Recently they did a version of the video for Destroy by Ladytron which was very funny. As a result of this animation I have got very interested in Ladytron, the song Destroy is great. I haven’t yet bought anything, no money has changed hands, but the chances were high that it would.

But now i’m not so sure. The site has been told to take the animation off by Ladytron’s management.

I’m not going to make any comments on the legality, appropriateness or otherwise of weebl and bob doing what they did but I will say that the digital industry and music industry have to start to have a proper dialogue about how IP is managed in the digital environment. It has to be a conversation that acknowledges that the world has changed and that business models need to change to keep up with it, to follow users, to be alongside them on the journey and find new models that might be even better than the existing ones otherwise the public and the innovators will find new models for them.

There is a great opportunity here for us because we understand the digital market place and online consumers and we are more likely to understand digital natives that genuinely see no problems in sharing music and have flexible expectations of how media mashes.

We also need to help them understand that in a digital world things that can be easily copied have little value, things that can’t (and are therefore scarce) have great value. It’s just supply and demand. Tracks have little value - Artists have massive value. Record companies have access to both of these assets, but they are sweating the wrong ones.

But don’t just take my word for it. I recommend you go and check out Terry McBride’s blog or this article on IP Democracy that will give you more insight into what a forward thinking music producer thinks about all this stuff. It’s an interesting and fruitful area for thought and digital business.