Torn Between Two YouTubes
I don&#x27;t where people get this notion that the music business is somehow &quot;greedy&quot; when the profits and margins are small.<p>The record companies are not mere &quot;middle-men&quot; between artist and fans. They actually fund the costly process of creating and marketing music.<p>For better or worse, we have an economic system grounded in the concept of intellectual property.<p>Only with the music business are the producers of a good, who undertake the production of that good at a ridiculously high risk, branded as &quot;greedy&quot; if they attempt to sustain a viable business from their efforts.<p>As far as I&#x27;m concerned, Apple, Google, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon and the like are parasitic &quot;middle-men&quot; who bring a commodity level service to the industry.<p>Through quirks of the market structure, they have been able to extract the bulk of the value from one of our sublime cultural goods, and leave the actual producers scrambling for crumbs.<p>If Google thinks it&#x27;s no big deal, why don&#x27;t they just undertake the production of the content that they monetize? They won&#x27;t, because it&#x27;s a crap business, and only exists because the people who create music are at least in part driven by non-pecuniary rewards.<p>That&#x27;s the way it goes, but spare us this attempt to paint this as a morality tale.