U2 manager still thinks ISPs are freeloading

his month's U.K. edition of GQ Magazine contains a fairly substantial article from U2 manager Paul McGuinness in which he blames Internet service providers and technology companies directly for the falling sales of recorded music. As he notes in the article, he made a speech on this subject about two years ago and was roundly criticized by various "anonymous bloggers." I've never been anonymous, but I did point out some of the factual inaccuracies and weird assumptions in his speech at the time.

U2 still packs shows, but their albums don't sell like they used to.

I can't speak for anonymous bloggers everywhere, but I've never said that recorded music should be free. It shouldn't! What I have said is that the recorded music industry must come to terms with the fact that it's competing against free. That's reality, and no amount of wishful thinking or legislation will change it. The problem didn't arise with the Internet. It arose with the Redbook CD standard, which didn't have digital rights management or copy protection built in. It has for a long time been trivially easy to rip an audio CD to a non-protected format, then share the resulting file--not only through the Internet, but through simpler methods like exchanging flash drives and CD-Rs.

The other big problem: McGuinness still seems to believe that many broadband customers signed up primarily to download and share digital content. As he asks in the GQ article, "Do people want more bandwidth to speed up their e-mails or to download music and films as rapidly as possible?" The assumption that the latter is true grossly oversimplifies the scope of the Internet. Has he heard of Facebook? Ever try uploading family photos via a dial-up connection? What about Skype--how does that work via dial-up? Video chat? Online gaming? There are 25 million Xbox Live users now. Does he think that most of them signed up for broadband primarily to download free content?

This is all hair-splitting because, as I said last time, I agree with his solution. The only way the music industry can survive is by embracing subscriptions and working with ISPs to offer subscriptions bundled with broadband and/or mobile access.