Fred Wilson is a very successful venture capital guy. He’s happy to pay for his music downloads and streaming. But Fred Wilson is a music pirate.
Follow that maybe-a-bit-inflammatory link and you’ll see why Fred Wilson is a music pirate. And as long as you aren’t an RIAA employee or working for a record label or other media business you probably agree with Fred on this.
I’ve made this point before here at Answer Guy Central. Make the conversation about music, movies, or whatever; we need better distribution channels.
Now let’s be clear about a few things:
When big companies do distribution agreements with other big companies, the dealings are complicated. They take time to work through and get rolling. So I understand that there’s very little chance of a magic wand being waved so that I never again encounter a rude Blockbuster employee telling me I’m asking for too old a movie (this actually happened to me when in a fit of nostalgia I went searching for “Broadcast News“; it’s all of twenty years old).
But the ability to make anything you want to see or hear available is possible right now. It’s only the lack of distribution deals that stops it from happening.
And you may be sure that when I wanted to see Broadcast News, I did. Is that piracy? Sure. Is it wrong? Oy, vey.
I expect that Fred Wilson has some kind of broad licensing play up his sleeve. And hey, Fred, if you don’t, give me a call; we can do business together.
Make business change happen whenever it looks like it’s needed. It usually is.
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