Warner Chappell Apology For PearLyrics

RacerZero writes "The recent Slashdot story Music Should Be Heard But Not Understood sparked a good deal of discussion about the overreaction of music industry heavyweights. This week Wired is running an apology from Warner Chappel music for their poor judgement. From the article: 'Facing an upswell of protest, Warner Chappell Music on Friday formally apologized to Walter Ritter over a letter it sent to the software programmer earlier this month targeting a helper application for Apple's iTunes called pearLyrics.'"

Comments

Killing the Golden Goose

[Alien54]

otherwise known as the tradgedy of the commons, or

"First, We kill all the lawyers"

the music industry has gotten so paranoid that free advertising is seen as a mortal threat.

a friend of mine who is in the business told me recently:

Oh, I love these "the big record companies are Satan" kind of posts.

All my friends at big record companies would vastly prefer this to be the case as opposed to the reality:

the big record companies don't have a clue and are scared they won't exist in ten years.

that last bit is interesting:

and are scared they won't exist in ten years.

Of course, the paranoia doesn't help, and still leaves us with the question of what would be a realistic business plan they could follow.

Yeah, they're sorry

[Tim C]

Sorry they got caught. Sorry people reacted the way they did.

What makes me think that if no-one had noticed, they'd have taken this thing right through to the bitter end, even if it meant ruining the poor guy?

One of the sad things...

[SmoothTom]

One of the sad things about this whole incident is that the music company seems to not even have tried to ascertain what the application was doing - it is merely a very focused search engine that makes it easier to find lyrics and attach them to purchased music.

Another sad thing is the chilling effect on further development of anything associated with the music industry and music lovers in general. As was said in the article:

One of Ritter's recent brainstorms -- an application that queries lyrics data online to help music fans choose tracks based on themes, like "love" or "breakup" -- may now remain only an idea, he says.

A search feature like that could actually HELP the music industry (as well as listeners) by leading potential customers to new 'must have' songs for their collections.

The short-sighted, overly litigatious folks in the music industry are the ones causing the majority of the problems for their industry. The world has changed over the last century, and they need to look ahead rather than behind in shaping their business.

--
Tomas