So there’s a record company in Brazil, Trauma Records, which is the largest Brazilian Record Company, which has begun to use creative commons licenses to release their content under totally free terms, but you can use it for non-commercial purposes only. And their strategy is that in the 21st Century, the business of a record label is brand. So the way you build brand is to make great content and make it accessible and then you begin to sell wholesale, like collections of content or sell content for ring tone downloads or things like as an alternative way to raise money for the artists as opposed to selling, you know, per copy the content which the artist produces. That might prove to be a very – much more successful business model than the current business model of the record industry and if it, then the competition will drive businesses towards that model rather than to the current model of controlling, in the Sony way, the number of copies of each song that’s distributed. But I think what we need is lots of competition to see what actually works and lots more freedom especially for artists to begin to fuel that competition.

One of the hardest things we found in the context of the sampling license, which was again suggested to us by Geppeto Geil and the group Negative Land, is not that artists don’t think it’s a great idea. It’s that the record labels won’t permit them to experiment with it. So, you know, Geil himself wanted to be able to release his content under this type of license, but his record label was very hesitant to permit that kind of licensing of this type of content. And I think that’s a very short-sided response by record labels and also unfortunate for artists because I think what we need is different views about how best to do this and lots of experiments with these different views and the best people to drive those experiments, in my view, would be artists. So we should be reinforcing the power of artists to control their destiny, their copyright destiny in this sense as way to figure out what the best model is for the digital age. I think tinkering with the structure of rights in a way that drives the bottom line of creativity – that says, “Let’s encourage more creativity,” either by lowering the costs of being a creator or by making sure that the rights make sense for the particular form of creativity, we would improve the system for both consumers and for creators.

If you think of your business as producing bits of plastic, which are sold through exclusive distribution channels, there’s no doubt than an alternative that tries to free up access to content is in competition with that business. So a record label that says, “Our job is to sell pieces of plastic or vinyl or cassette tapes,” you know, I think is right to worry about technologies for distributing content in freer ways. But I think what many labels are beginning to recognize is that that’s neither an interesting nor profitable business or there’s more profitable businesses to be in. It’s not that there isn’t a role for a record label in the 21st Century. It’s just a different role, right? So think about the history of publishing as an example. It used to be publishers published, right? They actually had printing presses that printed books. There are no publishers that publish in that sense anymore, right? They’ve outsourced all of that to another industry. There’s a very concentrated industry of, you know, basically a couple business that are in the business of printing the books and what publishers do is all the value added of deciding who to publish, making sure it’s good quality and doing the marketing on top of it, right? That’s a radical change in the structure of the business.

I think publishers are happy with that change, but it signals that what the businesses outta be focusing on is, what’s the valued added that we can bring given the technology of the day? And I think that particular music industry executives are beginning to think like that in the context of music. You know, it’s not the value added of controlling distribution of bits of plastic. That’s a very boring business to be in. It’s much more interesting to be in a business of trying to – much more effectively figure out what content is good or what niche markets can we serve or what ways can we actually make our product more accessible or more valuable to users when they get it? And to the extent publishers – record labels think like that, I have lots of face that the market place will reward them and drive the businesses in that direction. So –

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