Record labels trying to thwart innovation with series of lawsuits

Wow, the last few days have been full of turmoil in the music industry’s standpoint. EMI sued both Seeqpod and Favtape, and Warner sued Songbeat.

EMI has broken a new low, by suing founders of startups personally in an effort to thwart innovation so that they can hold on to their broken business model a few months longer. Warner music is also suing a developer that was using the API. It is amazing to me that the writing which is so clearly on the wall is just completely ignored by the music industry.

RollingStone magazine carried an article on the decline of the music industry back in 2007, and it seems like we have been stuck in a timewarp. The decline has been constant pretty much since 2000, when bandwidth became more freely available to start paving the way for a multimedia internet.

The problem with the music industry is that it has constantly tried to focus more on the industry part, and less on the music part. Despite revolutions in technology and tools that help more and more people make all kinds of different music (and actually spread it to people who would enjoy them), the labels have been living in denial, opting to find ways to keep making money the same old way instead of trying to keep up with the turning tide and find alternative business models.