With talk of Universal Music Group going month-to-month on their music licensing with the iTunes Music Store, here is an interesting post and a great analogy from Fake Steve Jobs:

These guys could have done what we did. In the early days of the Internet, everyone figured the majors would build digital distribution arms. But they didn’t do it, because they didn’t understand technology, and they didn’t want to invest in building this expertise, and they were freaked out about piracy and paralyzed with fear. So we stepped in…

…Ironically the mistake the major labels made was the same one that IBM made when it gave the DOS franchise to Microsoft nearly 30 years ago. They were faced with a new market that they didn’t understand. They had a piece of work that they couldn’t do on their own or didn’t want to do on their own and they didn’t view it as critical or important, so they outsourced it to a partner. The partner turned that seemingly unimportant work into a way to accrue power and create a monopoly and control the industry. Today in the music business we’re about where IBM and Microsoft were in 1989, when IBM finally got hit with the clue stick and realized what Microsoft was doing.

excerpted from The music industry nobs have finally figured out what we’re doing | The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

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