Beggars Banquet Man Calls for Government Action in MIDEM Speech
MIDEM is one of the largest music industry gatherings on the planet. Martin Mills, the head Head of the Beggars Banquet group, was honoured with an “icon industry award”–and he got to vent his spleen about the state of the industry these days, especially when it comes to governmnet inaction.
I am not here today to attack the majors, though my views on the perils of consolidation for the market and for the art form we all love remain as strong as ever. And the new Sony Music deal with Pandora illustrates succinctly why we’ve been ringing alarm bells for so long – one company’s scale being leveraged to secure a disproportionately large slice of a relatively fixed size pie, at the likely expense of smaller companies. But I am here today to agree with the majors – in fact, the majors in all the creative arts.
I want to address the lack of support that governments, politicians and bureaucrats worldwide show to the creative industries. Many pay lip service to the value and importance of the creative economy, but most fail to match that with their actions. Creative industries are built upon strong and defendable intellectual property rights, and without that they will inevitable wither and fail. It is impossible to make the investments to produce new creative goods without the security that ownership of them is protected.
Yet governments are seduced daily by elements of the new technology industry into diluting and compromising that security. Often in the name of the importance of those industries to today’s economies, often in the name of open Internet philosophy. But all of these arguments are aimed self-interestedly at compromising the value and the integrity of creative goods. These creative works are a priceless national cultural and economic asset, which should be treasured, not dumped.