Why Does The Music Industry Not Learn?

Somewhere a PR machine is slowly turning its wheels as it begins to generate noise around the Arctic Monkey’s next album Humbug. You can see the seeding of exclusive gossip and streaming preview tracks seep through the RSS shower. It all looks very sophisticated: teasing the public about a widely anticipated album, twisting the media gently to build the noise. But the PR people seem to have forgotten a major thing: it’s 2009 not 1995.

When someone reads about the album they’re going to go to a number of sources to try to buy it – some of those like iTunes and Amazon make money for the music industry. When that music lover finds that the track isn’t ready until August 24 what do you think they’re going to do. Yep, they’re not going to wait – they’re going to BitTorrent it today.