Catching up on the latest populist wisdom from Fake Steve Jobs in a post from last week, His Fauxness holds forth on the labels’ predicament:
[T]hese guys are actually operating two very low-tech businesses. One is a form of loan-sharking: they put up money to make records, then force recording artists to pay the money back with exorbitant interest. The other business is distribution. Their loan-sharking business is being eliminated by low-cost digital recording technology that lets people make an album for very little money.
FSJ ignores the missing bridge or real output of the labels, which is promotion. Sure, anyone can record digital songs with GarageBand or M-Audio’s Session, but who’s going to buy them if they’ve never heard of them? Indeed, FSJ came to terms with his own challenges of content monetization in a more recent pot celebrating breaking the million-pageview mark, but that post has disappeared from the site.
Hmm, are you Fake Steve?
No, but I just might be Fake Ross.