the dotmatrix project

(originally uploaded by rahen z)

Gene Simmons

[...]

The record industry doesn’t have a f*cking clue how to make money. It’s only their fault for letting foxes get into the henhouse and then wondering why there’s no eggs or chickens. Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid’s face should have been sued off the face of the earth. They should have taken their houses and cars and nipped it right there in the beginning. Those kids are putting 100,000 to a million people out of work. How can you pick on them? They’ve got freckles. That’s a crook. He may as well be wearing a bandit’s mask.

Doesn’t affect me. But imagine being a new band with dreams of getting on stage and putting out your own record. Forget it.

[...]

There’s so much crap in that blurt, I almost don’t know where to begin. I agree 100% with Simmons that the music industry has had no clue in evolving their business model to work with the open mechanisms of the internet since its inception… but that’s where we go our separate ways.

1. The music industry should’ve dropped the moniker “record” as soon as digital tracks became available. No one buys records to listen to records anymore. It’s apropos, though, that someone as musically irrelevant and ancient as Gene Simmons still uses that language.
2. There is no henhouse. Never has been. The internet as a protocol is close to being P2P native, but software designed to transfer files across the internet in a collaborative fashion simply took advantage of music as a file format, like any other document of bits. Who do you sue for that?
3. Suing fans into perpetuity does nothing to improve “record” sales or halt the evolution of technology and culture. A better approach would’ve been to figure out how to make money off P2P instead of trying to eliminate it while ostracizing the market with fear tactics.
4. Who is this class of 100,000 to a million people out of work? Throughout time and across industries, the middleman has never enjoyed a guaranteed existance with technology in play. And if Simmons is referring to artists, he’s on crack. Artists — of any kind — are not guaranteed a career by anyone, in any medium. If they were, I wouldn’t be a commercial artist to pay the mortgage and an artist on the side to fulfill my soul. Simmons is still experiencing a coke high from the seventies with that perspective.
5. People who copy files that were designed to be copied are now crooks? Either lock the goods in the safe (DRM) and change the very DNA that defines a digital document or monetize the actual process of being “looted.” There’s no in-between and the market is clearly not buying into the future of DRM.
6. Hey Gene, hate to break it to you, but bands are still hitting the stage and they’re more empowered than ever to make a “record.” The difference? They don’t live in an age where long tongues, fake blood and platform boots can sell millions of copies of a two-hit record for $10, all the while being fronted big cash by a label who could sell an igloo to an Eskimo and get him to pay an extra $100 to see a grade B act fill a Colosseum show. This is the information age; those days have been dead for years now.

I do love you in Gene Simmons Family Jewels, though.