All About the Benjamins

What's been painfully obvious over the past few years is that the big records companies decided that their job was to cling desperately to an increasingly outdated business model rather than try to, you know, make money.

But it's hard to see how anything other than their own rank incompetence would really consign them to oblivion. They've got first mover advantages, name recognition, extensive back catalogs, marketing muscle, etc... There are certainly economies of scale - even in this exciting new world - in that industry to support big players. Perhaps they should stop filing lawsuits against their customers and start thinking up exciting new ways to screw newly signed bands out of all of their money obtain their appropriate share of revenues from exciting new talents.

If I were Rick Rubin, I'd commission a spoken word album by one Tom Friedman. The title, of course, would be "Suck On This."