The labels are distribution companies in the era of the internet. Staying in business without suing customers and stifling content producers would be amazing.
Edit: Perhaps I am being misunderstood. I am saying they are screwed and dragging things out to hold on to profit. How is this a controversial position?
I don't buy the Matt Maroon argument. I've worked in large corporations and observed general incompetence at many levels. You only need to look at the state of the finance industry today to see that highly paid experts can get things wrong on a massive scale.
That's not even a function of intelligence - it seems to be more a function of the level of isolation they live in. How thick are the walls of your industry's bubble? For the finance industry, it was thick enough that it's not even completely burst yet.
The music industry, similarly, seems to have an exceptionally thick bubble (probably thickened with dried up bits of Coke, discarded LSD papers, and the money they accumulated over the last 50 years of ripping off the general public and their own artists). I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that these smart people, who, outside of that bubble, would probably think like you and me, really do believe their own bullshit - if only because they spend all day surrounded by people who keep repeating it.
Years back I used to go to Mensa meetings in NYC and found that the most distinguishing feature of the crowd was not what the thought or believed, but how they expressed themselves.
Overall, the Mensa folk (for the sake of argument, "smart people") believed much the same things as the average person on the street, but they had a much better vocabulary.
(Actually, one thing else was interesting: beliefs held seemed to be more extreme. E.g., higher numbers of hard-core socialists and libertarians than mainstream population.)
I have always wondered about the correlation between intellect and the decision to make huge life decisions based on one's own beliefs.
Simply having a consistent set of beliefs (or seeing the inconsistency in mainstream beliefs) will make someone seem more like a hard core libertarian or socialist.
But what does it take for such a person to hit the street and start trying to make change happen? Are such people ever revolutionaries? Or are they content to have a logically consistent worldview but sit on the sidelines?
Historically, most famous revolutionaries, from Che Guevara to Ghandi or Trotsky, were well educated, often coming from solid middle-class backgrounds (e.g. Che Guevara was the son of a doctor).
This is a strawman. He never says that the industry isn't brainwashed. I'm not sure why you are attacking that point.
His point is that the industry is screwed and they know it. Given the choice between folding in the towel and suing to drag out the process (making money along the way), they have made the only logical business choice.
Saying the industry has made the only logical business move is NOT the same as saying they are good people.
You really think that all those bankers at Lehman sat there plotting to suck the company dry until it went bankrupt? Even though 50% of their salary was in the form of shares?
How they can sue their customers, stifle their content producers, and stay in business is amazing.