Digital music: Go legal, get screwed
The Big Four record labels want us to think that the sound recording business is a reformed character these days. Recently, we've heard ritualistic self-flagellations from a succession of top executives. There was Ed Bronfman at Warner's, prostrating himself in front of Apple.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Register's piece lands at the end of a year-long charm offensive by the Big Four. In January 2007 Reuters reported the ailing labels were set to relax digital restrictions (signals that DRM was loosening), and by November a label chief was publicly conceding the industry had been wrong to go to war with consumers (the 'we were wrong' mea culpa).
What changed this week is the framing: Warner's Ed Bronfman is now openly courting Apple with apologetic overtures, and The Register's commentary argues the penitence is performance — that customers who do go legal still get restrictive terms and a raw deal. The tension between the apology tour and the actual product matters because Apple sits on the other side of every one of those negotiations.
First-order effects
- Legal download buyers remain the immediate constituency: the commentary's claim is that paying customers still receive encumbered files, so the labels' reform rhetoric has not yet translated into better terms at the point of sale.
- Bronfman's public courtship of Apple hands Apple leverage in licensing talks — a major label apologizing in public strengthens the distributor's bargaining position.
Second-order effects
- If buyers conclude that going legal changes little, the labels' credibility deficit pushes demand toward channels they don't control, reinforcing Apple's gatekeeper role over digital music distribution.
- Rival labels face pressure to match or exceed Warner's conciliatory posture toward Apple, turning executive rhetoric into a competitive bidding dynamic for the platform's favour.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry's centre of gravity shifts from suing and restricting consumers to negotiating platform-level deals with distributors like Apple — with the labels' reform narrative serving as cover for ceding distribution power.
- A sustained gap between penitent rhetoric and unchanged consumer terms invites regulators and press to test whether the 'reformed' labels' conduct matches their statements, keeping scrutiny on what legal purchase actually buys.
The trend: The Big Four are pivoting from treating downloaders as adversaries to courting Apple as gatekeeper, with executive apologies running ahead of any real change in what a legal download delivers.