This article is more than 1 year old

Wake up and smell the Doritos™ - Avril Lavigne's manager

Mmm. Doritos.

"Music is an emotional property. If you think about it music has always been free and it's only in the last fifty or sixty years that we've been able to monetize it."

What a good thing, I said. Gifted people don't have to work in factories or call centres if they can ship enough stuff. So why go back to the past? How is that progressive?

"I fundamentally disagree with you," said Terry. " The whole world is now a marketplace. Where there's eyeballs there's an ability to monetize.

Which is what The Reg does every day, I countered. But the sums for general purpose music sites, are fairly puny, are they not? Or social networks? Facebook apparently extracts about $3 a year per user. And that's the biggest social network.

Terry says that as a company over 60 per cent of its revenue was from digital, not physical sales last year. And we'll see a "new middle class" of artists arise.

The duo the Folk Weepies he says made over half a million dollars last year.

But what about the serious money giant telco's rake in? Wasn't that a more better prospect for future revenue than the ad department of a crisp company?

While stressing that there are lots of sources of money, McBride passionately agrees:

"Guys, cough up please," he says. "The ISPs damn well should pay. They pretend they can't do anything about their networks but when something goes wrong, they're sure there quick."

When he says people "don't understand copyright", he explains, what he means is that people don't understand the mechanics of the process. I said I thought this was risky - give people a moral justification not to pay, and people will bite your hand off to seize it. It isn't difficult. Or particularly clever.

McBride describes the report as "a checklist for artists", which seems reasonable. But unlike the incendiary predecessor in this MusicTank series - the one by Peter Jenner - there's more hope than reality in this one. ®

Download Terry's thoughts from here (it isn't online yet, but should be soon). ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like