economies, internet, language, and culture
Ever since I studied theater direction in college, I’ve been fascinated by Polish theater, and the posters created for the performances. Many years ago I saw a production of Rozewicz’s White Marriage at the Odyssey Theater in Los Angeles. The images and poetry of the performance remain with me to this day. To find and purchase a Polish theater poster once required a quest. Today, you can buy them online.
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Trent Reznor tried something similar to RadioHead, and didn’t like the results. In an interview with CNET he suggested an ISP tax that would allow all music to be downloaded for free. I suppose this would be like the tax that citizens of the UK pay to support the BBC. The tricky part about the kind of tax that Reznor suggests is distributing the monies collected. Who gets paid and how much? Distributed based on number of downloads? By what measure?
The music industry has done something like this before with CD-R discs. If you want to, you can buy CD-R Music discs on which to burn your music. They cost a little more, and the extra bit goes to the music industry to make up for lost revenue. But the fact is, a business needs to succeed in the marketplace. The music business needs to find a model that works with the new set of music containers and accompanying artifacts. Seth Godin points the way in his post entitled: Music Lessons.
They’re stuck on the idea of selling particular kinds physical of containers for music. It’s not just the music that people like to buy, it’s the stories and ephemera around the music. The one thing I miss about vinyl is the beautifully designed large record covers and the album notes. The digital container loses all meaningful context, there’s an opportunity there.
Comments closedWhen thinking about buying and selling music and films, we often attempt to point to the work of art as separate from the container we buy it in. It’s as though we think one can buy a song without any physical manifestation– perhaps just the ideal of a song. I would contend that reproduced works of art do not exist except for their containers.
This is in contradistinction to original works of art, because they are singular, they are the work itself embodied. This is the unique value of owning and living with real works of art. The viewers relationship is with the work, rather than the means of reproduction. Over time the containers through which we reproduce music and film have changed. From a business perspective, it has been effective to have each work recorded on to a small portable format that can be packaged and sold.
As the methods of reproduction change, the recording formats change– and we buy the next container. It’s at this point that you’ll generally hear the complaint that a particular piece of music has been purchased in many formats over the years. But of course, that’s all there is. There is no recorded music outside of the containers in which it’s sold. To hear actual music one would need to attend a performance.
We’re currently seeing the transition from a physical container to the digital container. Suddenly the purchaser owns a master file than can be placed on multiple devices and copied on to material formats like DVD and CD. This radically changes the economics of the entertainment business. The business used to be the production and sale of units. Marketing and distribution were keys to success.
We can see from examples like Google and Facebook that providing the entry and orientation point for the Internet can be highly lucrative. If a user chooses to pass through your site on her way to any and every destination, you can change a small fee for billboards on that road. A small fee combined with the volume of traffic that passes through Google equals a compelling business.
No company or product has emerged that holds an analogous position to recorded entertainment product. The leading contenders are probably Apple’s iTunes, TiVo and probably Amazon. The “recording industry” is busy defending the old model in the courts. This is a classic sign of the end of a business model cycle. Unable to compete in the markets, they turn to the law to encode their models (See buggy whips).
As the container as format moves to the digital, a new container emerges. The player is now the thing. It’s the iPod, the iPhone, the laptop, the television, the car stereo, the satellite radio player that is the other new ground for innovation. Two good examples of this are the Chumby and Dave Winer’s new FlickrFan. The television is a much more flexible output device in the age of HD flat screens, and Chumby is a classic simplification play. The iPhone and multi-touch creates an almost unlimited platform for software created user interfaces; freed from mechanical user interfaces (KVM) the field is open.
Organizing, curating, editing, programming, sequencing, suggesting, categorizing, collecting on a theme: these are the value propositions in the new landscape. Can it be done algorithmically? Should it be? Amazon often provides comical suggestions based on the attention and gesture data they’ve collected. Steve Gillmor has created an iPhone site that filters news based on sets of selected editors (professional and amateur). Jason Calacanis and Mahalo are attempting to provide curated search results, but maybe search isn’t the thing that people are really looking for. Maybe it’s the curation itself.
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The digerati scoff at Doris Lessing’s Nobel speech for the sections that refer to the Internet and ‘computers.’ The Internet and computers haven’t made them dumb, therefore they haven’t made anyone dumb. While it’s certainly possible to do interesting work with the tools that computers and the network provide, Sturgeon’s law always applies. Why would it surprise anyone that a medium with so many inputs would contain a lot of crap. If the network didn’t contain a lot of crap, why would we need so many tools to filter it?
People Magazine is only published once a week, but on the Internet it’s possible to immerse oneself in celebrity gossip 24 hours per day. It’s possible to focus on one’s obsessions to the exclusion of the rest of the world. We sometimes call it the echo chamber. The network doesn’t require that we challenge ourselves, it’s happy to endlessly feed our gluttony. Do we even view it as gluttony? Do we think of it as one of the seven deadly sins? It’s a vision out of Dante, a machine that feeds itself, a hunger never sated. Is the Internet post-moral?
We laugh off an old lady’s comments about the Internet without really thinking through the deep rivers that run underneath. It’s as though we really believed that time started on January 1, 1970 at 12:00 GMT. (and that the Apocalypse is scheduled for January 19, 2038)
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