Informant38

In a situation of such vast uncertainty, with the breakdown of all prior business and cultural assumptions, you don't necessarily want to have to depend upon, say, Tommy Mottola to create a new paradigm.

For a long while, the management response at the major labels had a weird combination of denial and foot stamping: putting Napster out of business-then sort-of/sort-of-not buying Napster -- all the while being told by everybody who knows anything about technology that, no matter what the music industry does, or who it sues, music will be, inevitably, free. Duh. There is, too, a management critique -- perhaps most succinctly put by Don Henley in his now-famous post-Grammy letter wherein he quoted Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles: "Gentlemen, gentlemen! We've got to protect our phony baloney jobs!" -- that sees record labels as generally engaged in the usual practice of ripping off anyone who can be ripped off while remaining oblivious to the fact that Rome is burning.