machine-envy

This week’s column in the New Statesman is a little dance around the grave of the music industry:

“Speaking as a reformed music journalist, it’s been fun watching the industry gasp its last breaths. First it sent peer-to-peer file-sharing underground with the closure of Napster in 2001. Now, it is suing its own fans. The music industry has struggled to cope with how its main export can now be translated into bits and sent down a series of tubes direct to its (not always paying) customers. And all the while, the music has only got better.

Vivendi Universal is the biggest of the remaining handful of bloated mega-corporations that have been suffocating innovation in the music industry since the late Eighties….”

Read the rest here.