Moby Makes Sense (No, Really!)

In yet another open letter to a hegemonic media power–in this case, EMI–electronic artist Moby decries the reticence of his corporate masters toward selling music to people who both want it, and are willing to pay for it.

Let’s go back to Sunday, when he posted this to his MySpace blog (punctuation is all his):

i’m writing this as a sort-of open letter to the people at emi. i’m signed to mute records(for the last 15 years, actually), and as mute is owned by emi that makes me an emi artist. as some of you might know, the record business is falling apart. revenues are down, cd sales are plummeting, people are losing their jobs, etc. things at the record companies, especially the major labels, aren’t looking so good. one bright spot in this dismal retail firmament is the sale of music on-line through portals like i-tunes. the dance music equivalent of i-tunes is a site called beatport. beatport, and other similar sites, enables you to preview dance tracks and then, if you like, buy them. the average cost for a track on beatport is twice or three times the cost of a track on i-tunes(which makes sense, as the tracks are a lot longer). emi happily allow their music to be sold on i-tunes, but they don’t allow their(and, by extension, my)music to be sold on portals like beatport. for over a year now i’ve been asking people at emi why they won’t allow their electronic dance music to be sold on beatport and i still haven’t received a good answer. one might think that in a time of rapidly dwindling revenues that a viable and proven outlet like beatport might be greeted ecstatically at emi and the major labels. but no. very simply, i don’t know why emi won’t allow their(and my) dance tracks to be sold on beatport(for an average cost of around $2.00 per track), but i do know that by not allowing their electronic dance music to be sold on beatport that emi have denied themselves very considerable revenue and have limited the audience for their electronic dance artists(not to mention remixes done for their non-electronic dance artists, like radiohead and coldplay). many dj’s live in urban areas with great indie-dance shops, and many dj’s buy vinyl and cd’s on-line from great indie-dance shops, but there are thousands and thousands of dj’s who pretty much only buy their music from sites like beatport. and with emi refusing to allow beatport(and similar sites)to sell their music it basically means that tens of thousands of dj’s around the world don’t have access to any of the dance records being released by mute and emi artists. so this is my letter to anyone at emi who might be reading: by not allowing your music to be sold on sites like beatport you are losing money daily and seriously compromising the careers of your electronic artists(like, for example, the chemical brothers, me, massive attack, etc). i can’t see why you(the people at emi)wouldn’t remedy this immediately and allow people to buy your records on beatport and similar sites. thanks moby

[SIC]! But seriously, Moby is onto something here that confounds me as well. We only have a few more years left in this whole “selling music” thing, so you would think the majors would be jumping at any opportunity. And here’s this store, Beatport, targeted to the types of people who would (theoretically) buy Moby’s music, not to mention much of the Mute catalog, and EMI doesn’t sell it there. EMI gave up on DRM a while back, so the store’s trafficking in MP3s isn’t an issue. The prices are higher than those charged by iTunes et al, so it’s not the money. Call me ka-razy, but if there is an outlet that wants to, you know, sell your artists’ music, then don’t you want to sell it there? I know there are rights issues and the like in some cases, but why is every major label’s entire catalog not for sale in every single retail outlet out there? Why do I have to troll the Internet just to get one lousy MP3 of Lindsey Buckingham’s “Holiday Road”? Are these questions that I should even have to ask?

Apparently so.

(P.S.: Let me know if you have an MP3 of “Holiday Road” in comments.

He is my favorite guitarist ever.)

i’m writing this as a sort-of open letter to the people at emi. [Moby’s MySpace Blog] Beatport [Official site]