How A Computer Company Saved The Music Business

From ther UK’s Observer newspapar, "The Apple iTunes store has been selling a million tracks a day, it was announced recently. And no, that is not a misprint: a million a day…Quite why the music industry didn’t spot the opportunity will be the subject of innumerable MBA dissertations in the years to come. "

"But for now the significant thing to note is that it was a computer manufacturer and not a record  company that cracked the problem of providing legal music downloads. On a global scale, you might say that the inadequacies of record (and movie) companies is a trivial issue. They make a lot of noise and command much public attention, but actually they are relatively small beer compared with, say, computers, energy or cars."

"…Why didn’t record company executives spot the revolutionary potential of the technology to distribute their product? It was partly due to ignorance. Most of those who ran record companies in the 1990s knew little about the net They knew a lot about media and showbusiness, but nothing about communications technology. And the people in their organisations who did understand it were low-status techies with poor lines of communication to board-level folks. So those at the top failed to spot what was happening because it was going on in a universe they didn’t inhabit."

"The entire industry, in other words, suffered from a serious knowledge deficit. This was fatally reinforced by the dominance of lawyers and accountants in large media companies – especially in the US."

Read the entire article here.