If you’ve been following any of the news in the music and recording industry you know that Radiohead announced they will be releasing their music for free, eliminating the recording industry middle man. Nine Inch Nails followed suit a few days later, followed by Oasis and Jamiroquai. The music wants to be free from monopolistic middle men who want to limit it’s reach, manage it’s distribution, and control it’s pricing. However the problem is music doesn’t need the middle men, once the technology and the delivery infrastructure have developed, the middle men act as an impediment to growth and progress. Right now the musicians have outgrown the middlemen and no longer need them. Just because the music business dies doesn’t mean there won’t be great artists producing great music. This story follows an interesting parallel to Google’s desire to control, and manipulate advertising, most recently text link advertising …
Let’s cover the basics, in case you hadn’t noticed Google has been on a slow and steady course to manipulate the online advertising market, in fact they’ve been doing it slowly and methodically since the summer of 2006. I documented my first hand experience with this price gouging in July of 2006 Google Adwords Quality Score – Set to Pillage and Plunder. The exact same process was repeated again November of 2006 Adwords Quality Update II = Price Gouging Round II. Then Google set about tightening it’s grip on the online advertising world yet again in August of 2007, obfuscating price increases with a Byzantine algorithmic update purported to improve the user experience – New Google Adwords Formula = Just Pay Us More.
With advertisers beaten into submission on pricing, the war shifted fronts, this time to people offering alternatives to Google, in the form of text link advertising. The first attack was straight out of 1984 by George Orwell, by encouraging citizens to report dissidents who didn’t follow “the rules“. What happens next, take a few high profile sites and make and example by banning them, or hitting them with a penalty.
Where’s the parallel … the recoding industry developed an infrastructure to distribute music. Google developed an infrastructure to distribute advertising. Both industries profited immensely being the middleman in a monopolistic marketplace. Now that the monopoly they enjoyed for so long is under market pressure to open up, and they are fighting to maintain control. The music industry looks to shut down the consumer with burdensome DRM. Google threatens to de-index web publishers who don’t implement official Google approved advertising methods. Google maintains that these actions are to prevent people from “buying their way to the top of the SERP’s” however their actions speak louder than their words, and their hypocrisy is crystal clear.
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{ 13 comments }
Awesome post Michael, and one that I’m sure to send over to some other colleagues here at the office. A lot of people dismiss the pricing issues and quality score as a way to clean things up, which may only be partially true.
It’s clear though, once you review each and every step that Google has taken — that they are quickly becoming criminal masterminds, doing little more than gaming every facet of the industry to their own profit.
Of course, this is nothing new… But posts like yours above is a great way to remind people exactly how that approach to business impacts current events in the news like the album releases.
I’m rambling — but this is a great train of thought.
Well said Michael. That is a great analogy.
Ohh yea. The new radiohead album rocks. Go download it if you haven’t done so already
Just downloaded the Radiohead record and paid my share. Mentioned it to a friend who works in music who said he downloaded an illegal copy from a different site.
Music industry people never pay for music. Hey, will Performix clients get a free serps kick when they’re part of the big G?
Thank Michael,
Just got turned on to your site and the first post is right up my ally. Record companies are raging wars with the DR and show no signs of being able to keep up with the ‘new music business’. Google is playing the acquisition game instead of making the web a better place to surf and view ads. i guess we no longer really need to keep up with the jones’s (or matt cutt’s or clive davis’s).
Look forward to reading more!
Well written post – unfortunately though, i disagree with most, if not all of your conclusions.
As an AdWords advertiser / SEM myself and fledgling SEO (white hat) i don’t see where all the hate of Google is coming from. It seems clear your upset about the hard line stand they have taken against link buying (if I am wrong please let me know).
Well, those tactics for artificially inflating your page rank by paying people to pump you full of link juice do far more harm to the quality of search than good. How is quality control making the web a worse place? I don’t follow you.
I am glad Google is trying to stop those kinds of tactics. Clever SEM’s will find ways to play by the rules and promote their brands.
For the record, Radiohead didn’t give their record away for free. They asked their fans to pick their own price. Hopefully people paid what they felt the music was worth, and didn’t just use this experiment by the band as a way to get the record free. That’d be sad.
Good post. I have to wonder about Google and their concern over paid links. Aside from the fact that the mafia protection racket tactics will make them more money, I think it is showing a bigger problem with Google. The problem is that Google search is actually broken and they don’t know how to fix it. Despite all of Google’s talk saying they discount paid links, perhaps the reality is they have not actaully found a way to do it, and so they decide to spread FUD instead of fixing the real problem.
Great article.
I like the reference to 1984.
I’ve written on a related topic. Just search Google for “Google as Dictator” and it’s the first hit.
Michael–
I hate the record industry just as much as anyone else, and I agree with many of your opinions about google — but I think it’s a tad naive to say that these artists are releasing albums for free because they want music to be free.
Korn didn’t hold a design contest for the cover of their album because they care about art education… they did it for the PR.
All these Hollywood loudmouths who feel the need to enlighten us all with their political opinions aren’t gearing up to run for office… they just want their names in the news.
Look at google trends for “radiohead”
http://google.com/trends?q=radiohead&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
See that giant spike at the end of a steadily declining line? I like the band but their popularity has been on a decline that extends back well past 2004.
Just my $0.02
Radiohead and NIN (and others to come) are playing smart with music distribution, since they don’t make all that much from music when a label is involved.
They make money on the backend, via merchandise and tickets sales.
People who cling to the “Google for traffic and revenue” combo have no backend. They just have a marginal job working for Google, with no benefits and the never ending threat of algorithm or hand-edit layoffs without notice.
The problem is, Google has a legitimate interest in providing a high quality search engine. Text links overwhelmingly aren’t advertising; they’re feeding data into Google’s algo to manipulate the outcome of searches. For pay. That’s not illegal by any means, but it’s not advertising, either.
…he will be the one to lead us into the revolution, with his cold stare and swift attack…
…the once-feared Google will have nowhere to run…
Well said. Google is going to far.
While I agree with the general thrust of the argument presented here I take issue with the claim that music is cutting out the middleman. Only the few that have already made it can attempt such a thing.
Having every band attempt to individually touch base with every potential listener is not feasible. What is happening, and may (hopefully?) describe the Google situation as well in a few years if they’re not careful, is that the current middlemen are becoming decadent, adding too much overhead and not enough benefit, and gradually being replaced, kicking and screaming all the way, by more efficient middlemen (but middlemen none the less).
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