Scott Perry of New Music Tip Sheet sent out an email this morning about the future of music. Not how it will be produced or sold, but how we gain access to the music we choose to listen to. Verizon, Time Warner and AT&T control the pipelines that deliver our musical choices, but with their already slow as molasses Internet and crappy customer service, will that limit our incentive to buy and share in the future? Scott makes some great points, it’s a long read, but worth it. Thanks Scott!

“So, this morning’s email was going to be about pipelines. How we need a steady flow of product to keep our industry blossoming. How it’s really nice that we have weeks where Vampire Weekend and Cat Power reign supreme on the charts, but how it’s also important that we not cluster three superstar artists on the same release date in a time where hit releases are few and far between. But I don’t need to harp; no releases in the pipeline = no trip to St. Barths (or St. Quiznos for most folks), we all know that.

Instead, I want to talk about different pipelines. My concern today is not about today, nor tomorrow – I’m worried about what’s gonna happen ten years from now. Because I’m looking in the tea leaves, and I do not like what I see. At all. I don’t care where people find out about music or how they pay for it in the year 2018 – my main concern is that ultimately, access to such music will be controlled by a handful of crappy service providers.

No matter where your music is stored, you’re gonna have to deal with a telephone or cable company to get your music – if it’s via a portal, a website, a P2P service, the celestial jukebox, an online storage locker, your home entertainment center, or some shared private server, you’re going to have to pull it down via satellite, cell phone, wi-fi, wi-max, cable, DSL, or an old-fashioned land line. And if the only choice you have to access that content is either AT&T, TimeWarner, or DirectTV, then we are ALL. TRULY. FUCKED.

For the record, I am a capitalist — I loooooove money, I love making money, I love it when innovation and service is rewarded. But what I don’t like is anyone, whether it be an individual or a huge corporation, not holding up their end of the social contract, by not supplying a good service at a good price. And for the record, telephone and cable companies are the absolute SHITTIEST providers of customer service.

All this talk about compensating rights holders for delivery over the internet will be worked out over time, I hope. And chances are, whomever delivers your streams or downloads will likely be owned by your Internet Service Provider, so that they can charge a premium to your cable or phone bill for such a service, and properly tabulate all the transactions so that the rights holders get paid, whether that content accessed be music, a TV show, movies, a video game, a software program, a JPG, or some other copyrighted file (Chew on this — one day your kid will own a wi-fi enabled poster-sized sheet of polymer that changes images based on their preferences – just like taking down the old Farah Fawcett poster in your bedroom and putting up the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders poster in its place (Hello, Getty Images, anyone?!)) .

I do NOT believe in a compulsory ISP tax for file-trading. Charge my mom one fee so she can hop on to more pedestrian sites eBay and Yahoo Games, charge me an extra $20 a month so I can watch Chinatown while downloading some (authorized) live ’74 Zeppelin bootleg and buying jet-powered Adidas cleats for my FIFA Soccer 2018 avatar. I just want to make sure that rights holders — those individuals and organizations with a vested interest in the success of the ISPs — are shaking hands with ISPs with one hand, and pinning them to the wall by the neck with the other, making sure that these service providers don’t screw up a good thing. Because right now, they are all screwing up bigtime.

Why do I bring all this up? Because right now, every pipeline that runs entertainment into my house has failed me. And it’s harder and harder to switch services when competition diminishes. Cases in point:

I love my Tivo, and still run my Tivo-enabled DirectTV box on the TV downstairs. But when I finally opted for a TV for the bedroom, my only option, short of throwing down a couple ducks for a standalone TiVo box, was to purchase a DirectTV cable box with their proprietary DVR service, which sucks beyond belief. It doesn’t suck as bad as ComCast’s DVR service, but it doesn’t hold a candle to TiVo’s ease of use.

I have used Sprint for Palm since I moved to California 7 years ago. I always found Sprint’s cel phone coverage to be better than average, and Palm has continuously delivered quality products. But with my recent upgrade to the Palm 700, I have had nothing but buggy service on top of what is now the world’s crappiest cell / web network – no wonder people are abandoning Sprint and Palm in droves. Make as many layoffs as you want Sprint, but until you upgrade your customer service (yes, at the expense of your quarterly earnings), both you & Palm are gonna continue to lose users. Is the insanely bad service by both companies an incentive for me to upgrade my services, or more reason for me to switch phones with a new carrier? You know the answer.

And AT&T? PacBell’s internet service wasn’t anything to crow about before the merger with AT&T, but now that my internet service slows to a crawl while I am uploading an album to a private server for my programmer to edit tracks for a project, you know it’s time to switch.

There are so many more issues beyond my own experiences – the massive internet outages last week in the Middle East due to cut underwater cables, Comcast intentionally slowing delivery to file traders (I get it, these bandwidth hogs are stealing your music, whatever – but if an ISP is allowed to exert such control unchecked, just wait until it takes you an hour to upload 2 minutes of your child’s first steps to YouTube), how impossible it is to purchase a ringtone for an artist that isn’t in the Top 100, how AT&T Blue Room edited Pearl Jam’s anti-Bush Lollapalooza tirade last year, Net Neutrality (a/k/a corporate pay for play), and potential indemnification from lawsuits affiliated with wiretapping – if you have read this far, then you know there are some long-term clouds that will affect EVERYONE’s ability to enjoy your artists’ work in the future.

Any rank & file at these companies on this mailing list, hold your peers to high standards as you rise through the ranks to become the boss in ten years. And any upper-level bigwigs reading this, do us all a huge favor and keep your partners’ feet to the fire at all times – our happiness, and your ultimate profitability, depends on it.

Looking forward to seeing a number of you out here for CIC and the Grammys this week, let’s make this a fun one.

PS, thanks to all who responded to last week’s email about the clips from MTV, circa 1983. I got a lot of one & two sentence replies, but this one from Stephen Smith had me grinning from ear to ear: “25 years ago I was the Associate Producer/Music Supervisor of a ground breaking television show, SQUARE PEGS. The show starred a 17 year old Sarah Jessica Parker and Jami Gertz, and was created by SNL veteran Anne Beatts. Before Miami Vice, and every music-driven show that has come afterwards, Square Pegs featured MUSIC like no other show did before — Billy Idol, Berlin, The Waitresses, Devo performing on the show. For those in high school during this time, this show remains a cult classic. Sony Home Video will soon release the series on DVD.” HOW COOL IS THAT?!

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