While the week has barely started, so far I’ve been mentally exhausted thanks to a global reorganization of my division – trying to anticipate and understand how it will impact me and if it will be better or worse in the long term. So far I am not optimistic.

It’s relatively typical of this company that even though I was able to guess the key points a few weeks in advance of the actual announcement, when the official word went out, not only did no one bother to call me to tell me I was going to have a new boss, I wasn’t even copied on the email. “A communications company where no one communicates” is a phrase I’ve often used to describe our little slice of multi-national hell.

They’ve thrown the dog a bone in a manner of speaking. They’ve offered me a promotion, “maybe.” Not quite the one I’ve been lobbying for. An additional word in my title. No extra pay. No extra perks. No larger share of the bonus or options pool. I can get a new business card with this extra word and also add it into the .sig in my emails. This is supposed to get me excited? For the sake of job security, I’m pretending it does.

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One of the few things to catch my eye this week is the profile of Doug Morris, chairman and CEO of the Universal Music Group, over on Wired. Perhaps you’ve already seen it. It’s getting a lot of attention because of this snippet:

And that’s what Morris, and everyone else, continued to focus on. “The record labels had an opportunity to create a digital ecosystem and infrastructure to sell music online, but they kept looking at the small picture instead of the big one,” Cohen says. “They wouldn’t let go of CDs.” It was a serious blunder, considering that MP3s clearly had the potential to break the major labels’ lock on distribution channels. Instead of figuring out a way to exploit the new medium, they alternated between ignoring it and launching lawsuits against the free file-sharing networks that cropped up to fill the void.

Morris insists there wasn’t a thing he or anyone else could have done differently. “There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist,” Morris explains. “That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?”

Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn’t an option. “We didn’t know who to hire,” he says, becoming more agitated. “I wouldn’t be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me.” Morris’ almost willful cluelessness is telling. “He wasn’t prepared for a business that was going to be so totally disrupted by technology,” says a longtime industry insider who has worked with Morris. “He just doesn’t have that kind of mind.”

The ignorance is overwhelming and a shame, considering Morris’s long track record in the music industry. Presumably he has retained his job because everyone else missed the boat as well.

Here’s another bit that hasn’t been as widely quoted but is also interesting:

As Steven Levy writes in The Perfect Thing, his 2006 book about the iPod, when Apple was trying to start iTunes as an online music store it had trouble convincing the major labels to offer up their music. Apple managed it only after Jobs launched a charm offensive against Morris. According to Levy, a big factor in his success was Jobs’ assurance that, since it was limited to Macs, iTunes could affect, at most, 5 percent of the market. (iTunes for Windows came out in 2003.)Whatever the promises, once the mighty Universal signed on, everyone else followed.

With the record companies on board, Jobs did something remarkable: He turned the labels’ demand for bulletproof DRM into a way of locking up the retail end of the online market. Jobs argued that in order to make Apple’s DRM software, called FairPlay, effective, it had to be proprietary — and since Jobs won’t license FairPlay, tracks sold on iTunes can be played only on iPods. (Similarly, the iPod won’t play DRM-encoded files purchased through other retailers.) This lack of interoperability, combined with the iPod’s overwhelming dominance, gave Apple a stranglehold on the digital music marketplace. And Jobs got to be the good guy with consumers, blaming the mess on the music industry’s pigheaded insistence on DRM.

When I suggest to Morris that the labels gave Jobs license to create what was in effect an Apple Walkman that played only Apple cassettes, it’s Caraeff who answers. “Looking back, the best thing we could have done would have been to mandate one format,” he says. So why didn’t that happen? Morris is happy to field this one. “It never crossed anyone’s mind!” he exclaims. “We were just grateful that someone was selling online. The problem is, he became a gatekeeper. We make a lot of money from him, and suddenly you’re wearing golden handcuffs. We would hate to give up that income.”

For 25 years, record companies sold digital music without any DRM (the compact disc) and seemed to do okay. To me it’s continued proof of their lack of understanding of the consumer and the marketplace that they insist on DRM for online music. And only now coming to grips with how that insistence is slitting their own throats.

Anyway, there’s also this essay by Jermaine Dupri over at Huffington Post, which starts out like this:

Some people find it hard to understand my man Jay-Z’s decision not to let iTunes break up his American Gangster album and sell it as single tracks. They say he’s fighting the future and losing out on sales from fans who only want to download singles. But I say it was a stand somebody had to take in the music industry. Jay is speaking for all of us. ….. Every record is in some way a concept album. The whole always strives to be better than its parts

One problem is that this just isn’t true … there are very few “artists” who are approaching albums as anything other than a collection of potential singles and filler, a return to the days of the 60s before Sgt Pepper, Pet Sounds and Tommy (among others) revolutionized not just the music business but music itself. It’s not necessarily worse or better; it’s just how things are today.

My opinion is that if an artist creates an “album” then all serious fans will want the album and not just pieces of it. But when such a large percentage of so-called commercial product represents a collection of tracks put together by different production and writing teams, it just isn’t going to hold together as an artistic whole, complete and indivisible. I got nothing against singles – rock and roll was built on the single.

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Well, only four hours of sleep last night. Hoping to catch up tonight.