Who is the A$%#hole?
In his blog post Can we kill the music business too? James from songspin.fm has the magic formula to kill the major labels. He says:
In a nutshell, to kill the major label run music industry, startups will need to:
find great music from people who aren't assholes
let people do cool things with that music
let users share what they create
profit!
James goes on to offer his definition of asshole:
By assholes, I mean people who will sue you for using their music in your startup, which probably makes this first step the hardest. You can't have a great music startup without the music and more than that you need good music.
(Note that in that last quote, the first 'sue' link points to Grooveshark) James is certainly right - you can't have a great music startup without great music, but he goes off the rails if he thinks that companies protecting themselves from theft infringement are assholes. A music startup, or any business should not be able to build a business on top of someone else's IP without compensating them for the use. It is easy to build a company that makes money by giving away someone else's property. But it is not legal. For some insight on how things work at Grooveshark, read this thread on Digital Music News about how King Crimson tried to get their music taken off of Grooveshark. Included in the comment thread is this tasty bit by an individual who claims to work for Grooveshark that describes how they 'enhance' the Grooveshark music library:
We are assigned a predetermined amount of weekly uploads to the system and get a small extra bonus if we manage to go above that (not easy).The assignments are assumed as direct orders from the top to the bottom, we don't just volunteer to "enhance" the Grooveshark database. All search results are monitored and when something is tagged as "not available", it get's queued up to our lists for upload. You have to visualize the database in two general sections: "known" stuff and "undiscovered/indie/underground". The "known" stuff is taken care internally by uploads. Only for the "undiscovered" stuff are the users involved as explained in some posts above. Practically speaking, there is not much need for users to upload a major label album since we already take care of this on a daily basis. Are the above legal, or ethical? Of course not. Don't reply to give me a lecture. I know. But if the labels and their lawyers can't figure out how to stop it, then I don't feel bad for having a job. It's tough times. Why am I disclosing all this? Well, I have been here a while and I don't like the attitude that the administration has acquired against the artists. They are the enemy. They are the threat. The things that are said internally about them would make you very very angry. Interns are promised getting a foot in the music industry, only to hear these people cursing and bad mouthing the whole industry all day long, to the point where you wonder what would happen if Grooveshark get's hacked by Anonymous one day and all the emails leak on some torrent or something.
James may be right - that a big part of the future of music is letting developers do cool things with music, but holding up Grooveshark as an example of a music startup is a mistake. What Grooveshark is doing isn't cool. It isn't something that developers should emulate. James called those that sue Grooveshark assholes, but from my vantage point he got it exactly ass-backwards.