Content Wars

As one major player in television tries to force a rival not to distribute clips of copyrighted material, I’m reminded of many other such battles in media history. 

We’ve been here before.  In the 1920s, recording companies wrote contracts with their artists demanding they not perform on the radio, fearing that the rival medium would cut into record sales.  In August of 1942, musicians through their union (the AFM) officially stopped recording music because it was thought to reduce live performance employment. 

I worked in the record business years ago when “home taping” became the enemy.   I remember vividly the meeting where – quoting all available research showing home tapers were also the heaviest consumers of commercial LPs and tapes – I suggested that we provide discount incentives through an alliance with a blank tape company that would encourage tape buyers to sample new artists.  I came thisclose to getting fired.

More recently came the music companies refusing to allow their videos on the fledgling MTV (“we can’t give our music away for free”), and later fighting almost to their death the proliferation of music downloaded via internet as MP3s.

While royalty agreements solved some of those earlier disputes, it was the belief that corporations could control consumer behavior through prohibitions and barriers that was so misguided.  In fact, competition is frequently a boon for both industries.  In the radio vs. records battle back in the 1920s, for instance, radio’s popularity forced recording companies to improve technology and issue better records.  

Consumers don’t care about your financial model.  They want what they want, and they usually get it, one way or another.  When half the world watched the fake-news host trounce the bow-tied ninny on the internet, that fact in itself became news.  And how many people became hooked on fake news as a result?  Without YouTube, the clip would have found its way somewhere else and the traffic would have gone there.  And then the network’s lawyers could have hollered, “Cease and desist” to them. 

We don’t hear much about illegal music downloading anymore.  People tell me it was hard to do.  It took a long time.  The results were spotty.  Yes, it was free.  But iTunes is just too damn easy.  And by fighting MP3s for so long, what the record companies did was force that business and its profits into the outstretched fists of entrepreneurs. 

A casual inspection of the upload site owned by one of the mega media companies claiming harm from video downloads reveals tons of material owned by others.  Are they negotiating contractual agreements with all those rights holders and trading pennies with each other for downloads and views?

Watching the content wars play out between traditional media and new media will be fascinating sport in the months to come.  Stop fighting.  Learn from the traffic and harness it.  And always, always, always bet on consumer demand.  You can’t lose. 

Here is a related article by blogger Jeff Jarvis.