Record Labels Hope “You, The Source Of Free Labor” Will Be This Year’s Person Of The Year

Reuters starts off 2007 with a look at five companies that allow music fans to do the industry’s work of marketing and promoting a record for them: the roll-your-own-store company SnoCap, the digital-video distributor Brightcove, the peer-to-peer company Venice Project, the underwhelming social-music service iLike, and the pyramid scheme-esque PassAlong. The story is a bit of a bait-and-switch on two levels: first, it looks like we’re going to already have to ban the phrase “user-created content,” because with the exception of Snocap, none of the companies profiled deals in content that isn’t generated, at least in part, by major copyright holders. (Not to mention that the Venice Project, which allows users to remix videos before sharing them, only allows modifications to the originals that are “within the rules that copyright holders set in advance.” So much for the slash-fiction market.) Second, while the title of the story alludes to record labels pulling profits out from these companies’ efforts, it seems to us that any balance-sheet bonanzas will only come as a result of record labels being able to cut marketing staff and rely on the mythical users of these technologies. Unless that personnel-cutting frees up enough people to stage a 30something remake of High School Musical, it’s hard to see how employing what’s essentially a globalized street team (only this time, with more pop-up distractions) will help the industry rebound from another lackluster year.

Music biz hopes to profit from consumer content [Reuters]