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Edgar Bronfman Again Complaining About Things He Could Change, If Only He Wanted To

from the windbag dept

Wed, Feb 14th 2007 12:33pm — Carlo Longino

Back in June, we noted how FCC Chairman Kevin Martin tended to trot out the same speech at the various trade shows at which he speaks. Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman is another favorite at telecom events, where he gets up and talks about how the experience of buying mobile music isn't very good, how it's great that there are multiple formats for the same content, and how important DRM is -- as he did today at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, where he could have just reused his speech from a CTIA even in San Francisco in September 2005. Apart from the speech, another thing that hasn't changed is that many of the things Bronfman complains about are, at least partly, of his own doing. For instance, he says music is too expensive on mobile, while he complains about prices for digital music sold online, and how he's powerless to raise them. He says that mobile music shops should be "fun and easy for consumers," but insists on dictating exactly how people can use content they've purchased, with a view towards extracting as much cash as possible from them. So many of the things Bronfman complains about are things over which he can exert some control, though he chooses not to. While operators and service providers have made plenty of their own mistakes in getting mobile music going, Bronfman and his record-label cronies certainly don't make it easy for them, no matter how much he complains.

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Sanguine Dream, 14 Feb 2007 @ 1:37pm

That right there is what you call, "Passing the buck."

For those of you at home not familiar with this term it is the process of attempting to pass the responsibility of an unfavorable situation on the some other entity in order to gather support for your own cause.
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Jenny Murphy, 15 Feb 2007 @ 9:53am

Pass the Dutchie!
DRM is a joke...any kid can turn a song with DRM into an mp3. Labels need to lower prices of albums/songs and sell direct to consumers. The middle man is slowly dying; this is good because frankly, when I went to Tower Records, all they had was top-40 mainstream garbage for the masses. Brick and Mortar is dead, and so should be the middleman's cut of the pie. Also, The RIAA's efforts against file sharing are soon going to be a thing of the past with all of these new softwares that offer encrypted exchanges. Look at GigaTribe for instance (http://www.gigatribe.com), their free software lets users exchange entire folders of albums in a few easy clicks, and not even the ISPs will be able to spot what's being exchanged. The music model is changing rapidly, and people are just going to have to adapt. Oh, and didn't Bronfman get his ass kicked by some label once, like Vivendi's Universal or something? (I could be mistaken, I know he was involved in some power struggle a while back and watched powerless as his stock plunged in price!)
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