A Pain in the RSS

Just when you thought the record companies might finally be beginning to “get” it, the CEO of Universal, Doug Morris, in an address to Merrill Lynch investors’ conference revealed that, nope – it’s still just all about the money.

“The poster child for (user-generated media) sites are MySpace and YouTube,” said Morris, according to a transcript obtained by Reuters. “We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars… How we deal with these companies will be revealed shortly” [Via Wired News]

It’d be great to think that the method of “dealing with these companies” would be to embrace the communities built there and to recognize it as the MTV of the next generation and simply to appreciate the free promotional opportunities for their artists (as they, in fact, did with MTV in the last generation), but of course, doing that would mean there’s no market for their pay to own videos available through iTunes music store and the like. (A hangover from the fact that they dropped the ball on music downloads, discuss.)

My suspicion is that Doug Morris’s solution, rather than being one which will satisfy music fans and in so doing build artist loyalty and potential future business development for all concerned, but will be something that involves lawyers and letters of intimidation and outcomes more satisfactory to the rarified sense of morality possessed by the kind of pin-striped, spread collared old farts who attend Merrill Lynch Investors’ conferences.

Technorati Tags: Competition, Music, My Space, News, Universal Music CEO, Youtube