The Pack of Hyenas Kill and Maim

The hardcore bloggers? They are like a pack of hyenas, loud, fierce, obnoxious, and able to gang up on the big hapless prey and bring it down, moaning, ripped to pieces, eaten alive.

The music industry is the hapless prey, plodding, often stupid, but essentially doing a good thing: bringing music to people, and giving a living to those who love music. The bloggers who post every single day and give away entire discographies? At first the excuse was "we are sharing," but they knew it was stealing. So now? Now the hyenas say, "We want it free, and we found a way to get it free. Go figure out some other way of making money."

These anarchists have all the sensitivity of a pack of hyenas. As long as their own jobs aren't lost, they can make any excuse for taking what they don't own and distributing it without consent. Let the record industry workers survive on minimum wage, and let the record store owner sell shoes instead. The music industry is being eaten alive.

Headline in fan-friendly Rolling Stone 24/1/08: "Key executives laid off...morale tanks." The firings "targeted some of the most experienced hitmakers in the business...Universal axed A&R ace Rob Stevenson whose signings included Fall Out Boy...Sony BMG followed suit, cutting more than a dozen in publicity, video and marketing departments. Columbia lost its head of rock promotion among others, and Epic suffered cuts across the board, slimming the label down to fewer than 80 employees...Geffen Records let go approximately twenty percent of its staff..."

"In December Warner stock was trading at its lowest price...EMI...has pledged to drastically downsize...5,000 music industry employees have lost their jobs" and that doesn't include people who depend on the industry such as record store owners or sound studios.

You can't stop a pack of hyenas or reason with them. We watch the music industry struggle and flounder and bleed to death.

Good bloggers ask for restraint. They post a few songs. They have no Google ads. They try to see things from the artist's point of view. They don't want the artist to pay more money to a Web Sheriff or secretary in order to get links removed.

Sadly, people need laws. Without a law, without a security guard, they give into their baser instincts and too many become hyenas. When there is a blackout, some people transform into hyenas and take the lack of security cameras or sensor devices as an excuse to steal. There is a blackout with the Internet, where people can move in the shadows. In the shadows they change from humans to hyenas.