Looking up from Down Under

Ah, you've gotta love Australia, land of the public holiday. I’m back at work after savouring a four day Easter weekend.

That’s probably the last thing you want to hear on a Monday night in the US, but hey, I’ve got golden beaches on my mind. As a repatriated Aussie, I seem to spend a lot of time making Australia/US comparisons. Sydney and San Francisco have so many similarities it’s scary.

One man in a similar boat to yours truly is Altnet's chief executive Kevin Bermeister, who returned to Australia six months ago after five years in the US. Altnet's paid music download service is one that the Hollywood establishment loves to hate. Bermeister said he's extended many an olive branch to the music industry's Old Guard with little success.

Two great quotes:

Our principal claim in the United States is that the music industry has colluded, and been anti-competitive, and breached many anti-trust legislation issues in the United States

There is just no way to fight the progression of technology. If you believe that you can slow the progression down through the process of litigation to defend your own business assets and your terrestrial distribution, your old models, then you may be able to make life very uncomfortable for a lot of people but in the end you'll fail miserably.

The full interview at Linuxworld Australia also makes reference to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald about the rise in Australian music sales.

This is the news the record industry doesn't want us to hear:

In (1998) Australian record companies sold 39.6 million CD albums. Five years later the figure had gone up to 50.5 million. That makes it hard to argue that downloading and CD copying has been killing sales.

Posted by markjones, April 13, 2004 01:51 AM | | TrackBack