It seems a lifetime ago that I was in the music business.

Every so often I come across a story about a company that I know reasonably well.... Here is one that was on the Long Tail blog. About Universal and their DRM practices. In this case with Zune.

The music industry keeps on whingeing about how they are doing it tough because of piracy. They keep on trying to punish people who make copies of content. And still they are not getting it. DRM - in the way that it is currently being used - doesn't work.  Its not that content wants to be free. Its just that content doesn't give a damn.

When I was a kid, pre-cassett machine, I used to record music onto reel to reel tapes. I would record it off the radio, and record it from LP's. The thing that was the big change maker was making music digital. Copying ones and zeroes from one piece of memory to another makes for much better fidelity than losing generations in the analogue domain. The consumer should not be penalised for continuing to do what he or she has been doing for many decades.

The record companies need to wake up and smell the coffee. Forcing DRM down people's throats to underpin a failing business model is about as useful as creating an escalation of troops in Iraq to stop the violence.

The music industry needs to come to terms with the proposition that in a digital age there need to be not just new business models. The digital business models are orthogonal to the analogue ones. They must reflect the way society is not the way that the content companies would like it to be. 

The way society is is that everyone wants everything online to be free. And at the same time they have no problem paying for it by consuming ads. That is what is driving Google to +$500. Music companies take note. The world changed. The artists are selling their souls to Coca Cola and BMW. Get with the program. Incorporate ads into your models and the revenues will follow. Then all music will be free. And the DRM should be applied to ensuring that the music that is consumed the most gets paid the most.

Finally. Think digital. Most digital content will be distributed over the Internet soon. Music  has lead the way, now 2007, its TV and movies.

eMarketer forecasts say US consumers will increase by a factor of 6 their  internet music, movie and TV consumption from $1.3 billion in 2005 to $7.8 billion in 2010.

iTunes was a legal leader and now includes TV and movie downloads. Amazon and AOL are joining in so the smart marketers have realized the inevitable.  In any case, people who pay are only a small part of the huge numbers who already view, listen or use the internet for digital content. It's getting those people to make some payment that'll make big bucks for someone.

Ranking your site in a search engine is the new single most important thing a business can do. Six months ago we advised a client setting up a new business. The industry was full of well funded heavyweights. Blog, we said. He did. Now his website, a blog, ranks on google's first page of results for keyword after keyword search. His competitors spend thousands each month for adwords in both top of page and side of page positions.

They're furious he does so well. Can't work it out. He's drawing business from the traffic. He looks big. Ands he must be too eh? After all hes there in the top five or six results across the google searching. Why?

260 pages cached by Google; 21, the industry leader. The leaders been in business almost two decades. But yet they're been caught out by the swiftness of how business is changing on the net.