Doug Morris: Suing may or may not work - who knows?

I'm not sure what it is about Billboard's interview with Doug Morris that they think is so astonishing that no less than three separate people there sent out an email to tell me about it, but it does get beyond the level of a snoozesome Dennis Norden-Looks Familiar style memoir towards the end. Morris is asked if the RIAA lawsuits were a good idea:

It was an act to try and publicize that this is stealing and this is wrong. That's one way to look at it. Did it work? I don't know. Maybe it stopped some people from stealing, maybe it didn't . . . Did they deserve to get caught? Probably. People don't like policemen. I understand that. And maybe they're right.

Morris is the most senior person at one of the four companies that controls the RIAA cartel. And asked about a campaign that has seen his industry's public standing tank, that has ruined people financially, led thousands of others to worry, wasted swathes of law-enforcement and court time, and burned through millions of dollars, he can't do better in justification than a shrug and doesn't even know if it was worth doing in the first place.

It's almost like there wasn't any planning at the outset of the scheme, isn't it? Like there was no thought given to how the industry could tell if the lives wrecked and money spent were being done to any good effect; the schmoozing of lawmakers and retaining of lawyers was entered into without any study done to establish a baseline of behaviour they hoped to change, or any targets to measure their success against. Effectively, Morris has revealed the lawsuits to be a serious campaign entered into without any actual reasoning behind them.

As if realising that he's starting to sound ridiculous, Morris rallies into some sort of worn-out justification:

But when you see all the stores close and you lose half your employees and you can't sign bands to record them because people are stealing, we do things to try and stop it. You have a lot of people who think that things should be free. I don't know how they think we should produce it for free, but there's a lot of people who aren't logical.

The stores were closing "because people were stealing", and not because people were shopping online - apparently that's a given, is it, Doug? It isn't because people shifted their entertainment spending to DVDs, or because the record industry stopped making music that interested most of the market and instead targeted itself squarely at a preteen consumer? It's the stealing, is it?

And is Morris being deliberately foolish when he suggests that people want music to be "produced" for free? Surely he's not so far out of touch that he doesn't understand the difference between 'free at the point of delivery' and actually making stuff for free? If he really thinks that is what the debate over digital content is about - that producers should become charities - the Universal group should really be having talks with headhunters and passing the hat around to buy Morris a nice retirement gift.

The other possibility would be that he thinks we're all bloody idiots who can't spot when someone tries to pull some sleight of hand. And if Morris really does treat the customers of his industry with that sort of contempt... well, let's just buy the retirement card anyway, shall we?

Bill Werde, who writes the piece, then goes about as far in a public declaration of love as you can manage without having some sort of official present for the solemnization. 'Doug', says Bill, did it hurt when my old friends were mean to you?

The lawsuits have been rough from a PR standpoint, in terms of developing a real hubris from a certain subset in the blogosphere and magazines like Wired. I felt, and many others I spoke with felt that Wired-a magazine I once wrote for, by the way-took some cheap shots in a November 2007 article that you were interviewed for. How did you feel about that piece?

Oh, those beastly bloggers calling you out for suing grandmothers and single parents without any money. Doug, did it upset you? Do you need a hug, Doug?

They can write whatever they want. I think they see things differently than I do. My job is to protect artists, the people that work here, the copyrights . . . they have a feeling that I stop technology by trying to stop companies from infringing on our products-that we stopped the growth of all these companies because we don't like the use of our product without a license. I think that's their point of view. I have no problem with their point of view. I thought the magazine was funny because it's supposed to be a professional magazine but then they try to ridicule people to make a point.

But that's not the point, Doug - nobody thinks you're stopping technology. That's the whole point - you, the RIAA, haven't stopped anything. What frustrates people is that you're so slow to react to the possibilities of technology, any chance of a safe, legal service vanishes because while you're so busy trying to protect your investment in previous technology, the vacuum is filled with unlicensed services. Then you wail that the services are unlicensed, and try to close them down. By the time you close them down, the users have moved on to something else. Sure, the lawsuits were bitchy, heavy-handed and hateful, but really what irks people is that nobody in charge at any of the labels has given any indication of understanding how quickly technology is changing or any willingness to match the pace.

And, ultimately, the losers are those very people you maintain you are trying to protect - the artists, your staff, your precious copyrights. If people hold you up to ridicule, it's because you are ridiculous.

No, really ridiculous - Morris then starts to trumpet his company's hiring record as somehow justifying the rotten digital strategy:

Meanwhile, what have they [his critics] done? We're running the most dominant company that there ever has been in the industry. We're trying to do it in a way where we're really respectful to people, where the people in this company are treated great, where they're paid properly, where women are working in key positions in the company, where two of our chairpeople are people of color. Our greatest asset in our company is our people.

That Morris thinks employing women and non-whites is so extraordinary Universal deserve praise for not being sexist or racist is laughable in itself - presumably there are plans to invest a plaque declaring 'Gays welcome' to go outside the offices. That he thinks this means anything in the context of the company's approach to digital music - or, indeed, why policies that every company should have in place would be a point of distinction - is just bemusing.

And then Morris apparently slips:

I never listen to people.

There you might have an explanation for how the RIAA has managed to turn perceptions of the companies who bring us our music from 'benign uncle' to 'angry smiting gods'. The head of a massive company, a company which supposedly feels that people are its greatest asset, proudly proclaiming he doesn't listen to people.

Sure, he means 'people who believe something other than I do'. But the point is the same. The man at the top has a conviction he's right, and doesn't want to hear anything else. It's always like that on ships that are heading for the reefs.

Universal CEO: The new Shmoo

Rewriting history is usually a matter for the victors, so it's a little surprising to see Universal CEO Doug Morris being given a chance to try to address the perception that the record industry didn't see digital coming.

He tells Wired that the music industry knew what was about to happen, it just didn't know what to do:

Morris insists there wasn't a thing he or anyone else could have done differently. "There's no one in the record company that's a technologist," Morris explains. "That's a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn't. They just didn't know what to do. It's like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?"

Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn't an option. "We didn't know who to hire," he says, becoming more agitated. "I wouldn't be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me."

The mental image - of a bunch of guys in suits gathered round a boardroom, hearing the sound of the future but afraid to do anything about it because they didn't have anyone with the skills to help, and incapable of even developing a strategy which could find someone who had those skills.

Seriously, this man is meant to be in charge of a major international company, and he's asking for sympathy that he felt incapable of popping an advert in a newspaper to hire someone to look at their digital strategy? Are we to assume that the secretarial services at Universal are still provided using Remingtons, card files and carbon paper because - you know - those computer guys could be offering "a good bullshit story."

Morris is doing the rounds to try and promote Total Music - the desperate attempt to break iTunes' growing dominance in the US music retail scene by 'persuading' mp3 player and phone manufacturers to bundle a prepaid subscription with their product. Morris only wants to see the artists paid, you understand:

"Our strategy is to have the people who create great music be paid properly," he says. "We need to protect the music. I know that."

He doesn't actually mean artists, though. He means the men in the boardrooms.

Morris believes his industry has become something of a... well, a Shmoo:

"There was a cartoon character years ago called the Shmoo," he says in a raspy tenor. "It was in Li'l Abner. The Shmoo was a nice animal, a nice fella, but if you were hungry, you cut off a piece of him and put onions on it, and if you wanted to play football you just made him like a football. You could do anything to him. That's what was happening to the music business. Everyone was treating the music business like it was a Shmoo."

The music business is, indeed, like the Shmoo. The Shmoo last appeared in 1977 and has been a fading memory ever since.

But that's not what he means:

"It was only a couple of years ago that we said, What's going on here?' Really, an album that someone worked on for two years — is that worth only $9, $10, when people pay two bucks for coffee in Starbucks?"

Now, there's an interesting question - the answer, sadly for Morris, is 'probably, yes, even more so now'.

Coffee is a product which you can only sell once - you grow a bunch of beans, you grind them, you sell the coffee - having first shipped the beans halfway around the world. Starbucks also runs a huge chain of coffee shops, with all the costs that that implies, and with - pretty much - only the sales of coffee to make the cash back on.

When you make a record, you do the work once, and can sell the results over and over again. CDs are sold in stores where they're - most often - not the main product being sold and so don't have to bear the weight of the retail network.

Looking at it from the other side, there was some research a few years back which showed the average CD in the US got played less than once. Even if we assume that things have got better, and lets say each CD is played twice before being discarded, a large coffee from Starbucks will give probably about half an hour of enjoyment; a new CD possibly a couple of hours. That seems to suggest that coffee drinkers are paying $4 an hour for pleasure; CD purchasers $4.50-$5. Seems fair to us.

But Morris doesn't just deal in coffee metaphors - oh no:

All the sharing of the music, right? Is it correct that people share their music, fill up these devices with music they haven't paid for? If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go," he says. "That's what happened to the record business."

A chilling image. The trouble is, of course, that people get water coming through their taps, and yet the bottled water industry is worth $5 billion in the US alone. A large chunk of it - funnily enough - sold by the Coca-Cola Company. You can sell a product that people have on stream, providing it's delivered in a form which offers convenience and a pleasant experience. Perhaps if Morris spent more time thinking about how the Coca-Cola company has built a sizeable business selling something that people can get for free from their taps, and learned the lessons, he wouldn't be watching his company go down the plughole.

[Thanks to Michael M for the link]