“ This is War” by Devin Leonard in next week’s Fortune has got to be the most ill-informed and clueless piece yet about the ensuing professional wrestling match between the entertainment and technology industries. Here’s a clue for you dumbass capital “J” journalists: the war is against us, the customers. It’s not against Ted Waitt’s talking cow, Apple’s iPod, or the larger technology industry. The technology industry wants to lock up digital bits just as badly as the entertainment industry. The wrestling match is completely staged, scripted, and just for show.
Remember the first law of video production: it doesn’t have to be real, it just has to look real.
You gotta know that the technology giants are grinning from ear to ear when Chief Mousekateer Michael Eisner tells the U.S. Senate that the entertainment industry is “dealing with an industry where an unspoken strategy is that the killer app is piracy.”
Leonard’s water-carrying for the entertainment industry is clear when he says “global music sales declined last year by 5%, largely because you can get any song you want on the Internet these days free.” The truth, no matter how hard it is for the record companies to swallow, is that sales are down because the so-called music they manufacture (and I use both terms advisedly) sucks. Oh, and by the way, his inference that sales are down because of piracy is just plain wrong, as shown by this analysis of the RIAA’s own numbers.
In the same paragraph Leondard quotes News Corp. president Peter Chernin: “We’ve seen a fundamental collapse of the music business.” Peter, Peter, Peter, a 5% sales decline is not a fundamental collapse, you silly boy. The sky is not falling and the sun will probably come up tomorrow. Although the sun will be setting on your ass if you and your compatriots don’t get off this Chicken Little act.
The larger issue is that Chernin is either dumber than the “products” his company produces or he practiced for weeks to get that line out with a straight face. And shame, shame, shame on Leonard and his oh-so-very Professional editors for reproducing it.
I think Fortune just wants a little payback because the dot-com ponzi scheme crapped out and its readers are still collectively scratching their privates, wondering what happened.
As Dave Winer articulately pointed out in one of his best DaveNet essays ever, maybe the era of the monoculture is coming to an end. Ding, dong baby.
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