It's like a parable

I'm usually very skeptical of the hot new rook book, since I've been burned so many times. Chuck Klosterman? Ugh. That guy sucks. I'd been seeing bits and pieces on a new book called Rock On: An Office Power Ballad. Maybe it was his annoying author photo that turned me off, but it just looked like another lame music biz obituary. But this morning I read an interview with author Dan Kennedy on the AV Club and I actually "laughed out loud" several times. I added this book to the must read list. The quote below is a pretty good assessment of the major label's short-sited greed:

"You know, any other business in the world would have said, "My God, there are millions and millions of people who are showing this incredible demand for our business, and they want it in these files. They're trading amongst themselves and trying to set up ad hoc networks to do it. How can we make that a better experience and have them come over to our side?" That's all they would have had to do. That's all Steve Jobs did. The first time you tried to download stuff on Limewire and Kazaa and got partial files or weird mixes, you started getting disenchanted. Then Steve Jobs came along and said, "Hey, iTunes. Buck a track. There's no partial files, and you won't get booted off." And he sells three billion songs. But the majors see that as bad business, because they know that on those three billion songs, they could have made $60 billion by selling CDs at $20 for those three songs you really want. As long as you're addicted to a 1,621 percent profit margin, you're going to keep finding a way to hang on to it. But you're gonna go down with the ship. It's like a parable."