Ripped
How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music
Introduction
Chaos and Transformation
Peter Jenner is a man who knows his "freak-outs" -- sixties terminology for an intense, drug-induced emotional experience. He was Pink Floyd's first manager, after all, and he has remained one of the industry's most forward-looking thinkers for forty years. So when he spoke to a room full of music executives in the fall of 2006 at the Future of Music Policy Summit in Montreal, his assessment of their business resonated.
"We are in the midst of a technological freak-out," he said. "The business is broken.... Digital technology is fundamentally changing our business in a way that no development of the last two hundred years equals, except the onset of electricity."
Jenner described a worst-case scenario for people who had made a lucrative living as middlemen in the twentieth-century music business, the conduits between musicmakers and consumers. The Internet was making them obsolete.
"We're trying to force a nineteenth- and twentieth-century business model into twenty-first-century technology," he said. "I'm not ... read full excerpt from: Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music ebook
