John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats sez

Quote from John Darnielle of Mountain Goats:

…The new means of distribution aren’t things we as writers or
singers or whatever (”content providers” UGH ICK GROSS) ought to be
having dumbass discussions about at the level of “shall we? or shall
we not?” Because yes, we shall, and no, we don’t have any choice in
the matter, and yes, actually, it’s all to the good. You can whine
about spilled milk, or about the horse leaving the barn, but these are
negative ways of talking about it. I mean, in a sense, you might as
well ask “how do you feel about people having conversations?” - how I
feel about it is beside the point. The only question that big
corporations ought to be asking themselves are, in this order: one,
how can we do something with this that our customers/audience/whatever
will enjoy, and, two, how can we make money off it so everybody gets
paid and we can keep the ball rolling? For me the sticking point is
mainly the moronic sort of talk that the whole new paradigm inspires
on both sides of the discussion - people thinking of labels as The
People In Suits!! t3h ev1L v1LLa1nz!! and labels imagining that
they’re going to be able to control the marketplace, which is a weird
delusion anyway, because the customer has always controlled the
marketplace. It’s in the nature of marketplaces to be controlled by
customers, unless there’s some heavy monopoly culture, which there
isn’t….

Bottom line is that you can’t tell your audience how to enjoy what
you do; our job as entertainers is just to do what we do as best as we
can, and if there are corporations whose job it is to turn what we do
into money, their job is to do that without being gross and
embarrassing about it, and then to fairly share the profits. As a
rule, the bigger corporations are 0-for-2 on these last couple of
points though.

Found at: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2008/02/sam_means_inter.html