Last night Kobie and I were treated to dinner in Soho with Leon and a friend of his. Lovely! He knows Soho, so we went to (yet another) awesomely hip and trendy new restaurant, this time Thai. His friend (whom we met for the first time) was aslso quite engaging and we had lots of laughs.

Until I asked him his job.

Leon has been a friend for 17 years now – since we were children. He’s not always so tech-savvy, and might not realise that he set me up with the enemy. This friend of his is a very nice person, and I’m sure he meant well, but…

All in all, we still had a lovely time (despite the devil’s employee), and we even went out for drinks afterwards. However, the whole time his job played on my conscience, and I had trouble relaxing realising that my friends, colleagues and even acquaintances might believe me to be a traitor. How can I live myself, having done this?

So, what does this person do for a living?

He is an accountant (which is bad enough).

With a major, major record label.

It’s not Sony/BMG and it starts with an E and ends with an I. With an M in the middle somewhere. Might be an acronym, might not.

That’s correct. Leon’s friend counts the record company’s money. Put another way, he tallies up all the pounds that the record company extorts from us. Which is sad, because he is actually such a nice guy!

Obviously I could not let the opportunity pass me by: I had to discuss digital and new media with him. “We’re so excited about it. We’ve adapted our business models to fit the new paradigm on the Internet. We’re ready for whatever happens.” Ah, no comment.

Asked about how it’s going in the record label business, he was a trifle depressed: “ We’re on tough times – we don’t have enough money. We’re struggling, and that’s why we’re now so geared for digital media. We scored big when people converted their tape catalogues to CD. But we’re not seeing any money now they’re putting all the CD’s on computer”.

Hang on! I already paid for the music when I bought the CD. Now I have to pay again? You’ve already caught billions of suckers (by your own admission) when they re-acquired their complete record collection to shift to CD.

Seriously, they seem to be very distressed with their current financial state, but they also feel confident that they’ve done everything possible for the consumer.

“But record labels are notorious for lobbying for legislation to enforce their antiquated business models”.

“Oh no!” he answered, “We have changed so much to adapt to the new world.”

“Like what?” I thought, but at that stage my manners got the better of me.

How do I reconcile such a nice person with such an evil empire? And how do the artists feel? After all, they produce the original, artistic content.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 20:41 @820 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.