Musical theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd-Webber has railed against the internet broadband suppliers in the House of Lords for profiting from customers who share digital music - so called internet piracy, and urged the government to clamp down hard.
What I Think
I don’t mind a bit of eccentricity but LLoyd Webber is braying like a dinosaur at the small and furry ones. He’s desperate to preserve something called “The music Industry” at a time when the number of people who have access to the means to create music and reach new audiences has massively multiplied. But these are not the kind of ‘creatives’ he’s interested in, only the industrial megastars with their sanitised overproduced market segment targeted version of music.
His argument that without the contrived scarcity of monopolistic media industry giants generating profits for shareholders and large numbers of managers and marketers, then creative people would simply stop creating is clearly nonsense.
Lloyd-Webber said investment in higher speed broadband networks should be delayed until “there is a sustainable commercial arrangement for those creative works on which these new networks depend”, suggesting unregulated higher bandwidth would mean the film industry would suffer the same fate as the record business.
He wants to maintain a system which means that a very small number of manufactured “Stars” generate the lion’s share of the income so that the old fashioned media industries and all their hangers-on can continue to enjoy their lifestyles off the back of a restricted set of safe and successful artists. He’s using his position in the unelected House of Lords to urge The government to put try to put the internet genie back into a bottle, to stop a whole generation of people who have grown up with technology, from applying their own innovations and using the social media freely as a they have become accustomed to do so.
He might as well have been speaking at the annual dinner of the flat earth society.
The record industry has contracted largely due to its own inability to adapt to the changes in business model which the new media enables. Trying to slap government restrictions onto the digital peer to peer channels is like trying to prop up the hot metal print industry long after digital desktop publishing has been invented. Did the art of creative writing die and all the writers stop writing when the old system was replaced? No, they adapted and prospered and so will the songwriters, musicians and creative entertainers find new and different ways to earn a living in the digital age, it’s just that the shape of the pyramid structure that grew around the old system might have to change somewhat.
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