Google’s VP of content partnerships David Eun may be softly-spoken,
but his message for the music industry was loud and clear in
yesterday’s MidemNet interview: “Allow innovation to thrive, encourage
it… you have to iterate, you have to keep on experimenting. And unless
the music industry allows that to happen, we’re still going to be
scratching our heads looking for new music solutions.”

The clear implication was that this isn’t happening. “There is a
culture of ‘here’s my interests - meet them. And if you can meet them,
maybe you can have access to our content’,” said Eun. “And in that
approach, there’s often not really a consideration of the other
person’s business - ‘If you can’t make it work, that’s your problem’.”

Eun was keen to stress that there are plenty of people within the
major record labels who “get it”, but that also there are plenty who
don’t. “There are a lot of people who who are still very defensive,” he
said. “Sorta protecting business models, protecting what they know.”

But he returned to his theme of advising the industry not to
suffocate or slow down innovative startups later in the interview. “If
you know you’re in the business of harvesting tomatos, allow them to
grow and become ripe. Don’t just pick little green ones off the vine.”

LINK (via Music Alley)