And dogs will sleep with cats. That’s gotta be the next thing, now that I read Hilary Rosen is encouraging the movie studios to take a chance on digital distribution. The former head of the Recording Industry Association of America was on a panel this week at a Los Angeles conference. She was joined by the “current studio chiefs” at three movie factories.
PaidContent.org reports Rosen is now a convert to open media and online experimentation by the entertainment industry. “AOL did this tremendous experiment with distributing as movie online … and within a few days they sold 100,000 downloads, and then nobody ever did it again,” she said.
Well, talk about changing your tune! No longer taking a six-figure income from the music companies, or talking about the “epidemic of piracy” and the need for “targeted enforcement”, now she’s urging the picture makers to embrace technology. “Can’t we all just get along,” she seems to be saying.
Now, she concedes, the big mistake the music people made was to wait, and wait, and wait for technology to develop a plan that everybody liked. Didn’t happen. Napster did. And, finally, ITunes did. And so did monthly subscription services which have folks like me, who bought maybe 3 CDs a year, paying $13 a month for online streaming. The entrepreneurs figured it out, not the MBAs. Sure it was painful. But can you really be sure that the industry’s declining sales were due to downloads and not to records that simply were stiffs?
Living in Washington, I should be used to seeing partisans change sides when they want to endorse a check. Hilary Rosen’s identified as a consultant on the conference program, but Google News doesn’t offer any clue as to who her clients might be. Maybe after this week’s performance, we’ll see that she has some.
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