FT: Digital ants wreck the music industry’s picnic

I’d always mentally pigeon-holed the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society together with the other analogue-era dinosaurs of the music business; but it seems that I got that wrong.   In an article in today’s Financial Times, the CEO of the MCPS-PRS alliance argues that the big four record labels don’t have much of a future left.

For the music industry, the new digital technologies with their vastly reduced recording and distribution costs are a harbinger of industrial restructuring. Their problem is not the oft-quoted piracy, the length of copyright term or falling CD sales. The problem is whether the intermediaries between artist and audience can change their cost base to fit this new world. This puts music in the same place as coal in the 1970s, steel in the 1980s and TV in the 1990s.

Link

Update: Charles Arthur puts a print-publishing angle on this