TechWag

An absurdly myopic view point over Radio Head’s in rainbow’s “pay what you want” blog entry from Andrew Keen is available. What is interesting is that while he pings on Radio Head, what is not mentioned is that Harvey Danger and other artists have already put whole albums on the networks for downloads, and they don’t seem to be all that upset about the whole thing either.

It is not the consumer’s responsibility to shore up a creaky and increasingly irrelevant industry or business model.

But that is what Andrew infers.

That there are “real people with real jobs” out there, and yes there are, just like there were “real people with real jobs” during the dot com bust, or the Detroit Shutdowns from the 1970’s when the auto industry had to change (which got a government bailout), or when the change from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy, or even going back further, from a slave economy with serfdom as an added bonus to a wage economy where money was more important.

Human society has survived changes in how things were done for say the last 4000 or so years, society nor people should be propping up an industry that by their own admission didn’t get it, couldn’t find it, and tried to take its consumers head on.

What Radio Head did was novel, interesting, and yes, cuts out the middle men, much as outsourcing has cut down on the number of USA hires in technology, much as any other real person at any time in any country had to deal with a societal or business shift.

Nice try, don’t buy it. Thanks for bringing it up.

Lets put some lipstick on that pig.

Tags: layoff, idea, Participation //