I, Cringely has a thought on the glamorous entertainment bidness
In the Pulpit, Cringely comes up with a new model for music sharing. But first, the money quote:
Technology has already changed the economics of music creation and distribution, but the record companies are resisting with every weapon they have. I would too if I was in their position, which is fat, rich, and having everything to lose.
His idea is insidious. Create a company which will buy many cds. Then, sell shares. Each shareholder is a co-owner of the large pool of cds. Under fair use laws, they may copy them. There is even a business model - each shareholder would pay a small fee to the company for each download.
Aside from the business benefits, what this would do to the mental equilibrium of the recording industry is just delicious.
on
| § 3
§ 3 Comments
[ You're too late, comments are closed ]
That's GREAT, but there's
That's GREAT, but there's just one thing...
Cringely has a great idea for music [em]delivery and/or retail[/em], and
But what about all the other things that labels do, e.g. A&R, marketing, recording, and manufacturing?
To be sure, a certain amount of that can be, and is being, done by artists on their own. Cringely correctly says it is cheaper to do it yourself. But when it comes to marketing, manufacturing, publicity, and tour financing and logistics, cheaper does not equal better. In fact, it's almost impossible to have a serious career in music and not have a label or other consultants do these services for you.
But a market is a market and if Snapster "replaces" the music industry as Cringely suggests, then label-like creatures will spring up to handle these other services, such as the important one of actually creating physical CD's to buy. Eventually some companies will come to dominate this landscape just as labels do now.
Aside from revolutionizing how intellecetual property is dealt with in the short term, how does this change the situation and address the institutional problems plaguing the industry. Granted, this is not Cringely's aim, but any serious plan like this must take this into account.
A final note. It's going to be a hell of a long time before physical delivery devices like cd's are supplanted as the main mode of music delivery. Most people still don't have high speed internet, and many never will.
One thing he mentioned at the
One thing he mentioned at the end though, hints at a solution: if some of the profits from the new entity were put back into music, snapster itself could assume some of the marketing and promoting aspects. Further, if their were competing snapsters, for a relatively small price, the consumer could have access to most music available.
And record labels that have been suitably chastised by the growth of a snapster might perform these functions without all the lead pipe cruelty that has been their mode until now.
I can't remember where, but I remember reading someone suggesting that book publishing might be moving in the direction where a publishing house is largely concerned with marketing books, rather than purely making them physically.
A label or house in this scenario would trade on its reputation for representing quality books, and not be so focused on the end product - because they would be using many disparate distribution methods.
That's an interesting
That's an interesting scenario. The ideal solution, of course, would be to have all those mini-snapsters out there as well.
The probable reality would be that Snapster (tm), A Fully 0wnz0r3d Subsidiary Of Vivendi (Sony/AOL/Microsoft) would just be the big ONE music presence, a situation even less amenable to quality than the Big 4 situtation we have now.