Sony Candor

Sony's CEO Unplugged drops the good dirt. Among the gems, Nobuyuki Idei mentions that he'd love to buy the Palm software unit. Then he drops this reality bomb:

The music industry has been spoiled. They have controlled the distribution of music by producing CDs, and thereby have also protected their profits. So they have resisted Internet distribution. Six years ago I asked Sony Music to start working with IBM to figure out how to offer secured distribution of their content over the Net. But nobody in Sony Music would listen. Then about six months ago, they started to panic. They have to change their mindset away from selling albums, and think about selling singles over the Internet for as cheap as possible—even 20 cents or 10 cents—and encourage file-sharing so they can also get micro-payments for these files. The music industry has to re-invent itself, we can no longer control distribution they way we used to.

100% on point, shame the music people can't see as straight as he can.