Wealth & Money Quote by Jonathan Potter

Potter’s line lands like a sly diagnosis: an industry acting less like a market actor and more like a wounded ego. The phrasing “still pissed off” is pointedly unprofessional in the best way - it strips the record business of its usual corporate self-mythology (innovation, artistry, stewardship) and recasts it as a long-running grievance machine. His punchline, “still mad about radio,” telescopes a century of media panic into a single, almost absurdly human emotion: resentment.

The intent is to reframe the industry’s battles over piracy, streaming, and user-generated platforms as a recurring psychological pattern. Each new distribution technology arrives as both free advertising and a threat to control. Potter underscores the contradiction: the same outside forces that “promote their products and increase their sales” are treated as enemies because they move value and power away from gatekeepers. That’s the subtext - the fight isn’t purely about lost revenue; it’s about losing the authority to decide who gets to profit from attention.

Context matters: radio once horrified labels and publishers, then became a mainline marketing channel, then got folded into licensing regimes that made it tolerable. Potter implies today’s conflicts are the same movie with new actors: Napster, YouTube, TikTok, Spotify. The industry’s outrage isn’t just economic rationality; it’s institutional memory of being forced, again and again, to accept that culture spreads through systems nobody fully owns. The joke works because it’s true, and because it reveals how “disruption” often looks, from the inside, like reliving an old humiliation.