Doug Morris over at Universal Music Group has a hard job — he has to sell dying media to plugged-in consumers. For a hundred years, recorded music has come on platters of plastic called “discs” or “records.” You used to be able to sell those discs at a considerable mark-up in order to fund artists’ cocaine habits and to ensure that music company CEOs can afford the nice Scotch. Unfortunately, Napster came along, divorcing the music from the disc and turning the entire music industry into morons.
Seth Mnookin in Wired got a chance to sit down with Mr. Morris over a nice glass of warm milk and found that the aging oligarch and the rest of his cronies are so clueless that any one of us could have stopped into Universal, claimed to be a futurist, and described a brave new world in which music is beamed directly into our anuses using gamma beams. It’s a sad, sad state of affairs. Now if you’ll excuse me I think Transmission has finished downloading that Kraftwerk discography I “ordered” on the Interweb.
Universal Music CEO Doug Morris Speaks, Recording Industry in Even Deeper Shit Than We Thought [NYMag]