Hey Obama: Reboot the music industry!
While on the surface I would want to agree with Mr. Rosoff, I just can’t justify that sort of spending on the music industry. Yes, it would be great to have music education bolstered and stipends to help out musicians but it seems like such an egregious amount of spending at a time in which we are spending a ton of money anyway. Anyway, food for thought…
Gartner Says 2008 Should Be the Last Christmas for Retail CDs
This is an interesting numbers-type article that perhaps points out what most of think is obvious. I think they promote the demise of the CD too quickly though, it seems to me that drastically scaling back CD production is a good idea but ditching it altogether is not such a great idea. Aren’t there significant manufacturing and distribution costs associated with physical product? If you’re going to bother making them on a smaller scale you are still paying sunken costs for factories and the like to only give them away as promotional items? Additionally, you are forgoing the demographic that has the disposable income to buy CDs and lacks the tech savvy to deal with downloads. I don’t forsee that crew coming up to speed by Xmas 09….
Lessig calls for abolishment of FCC
As a former Stanford persona, I am a huge Larry Lessig fan. Love him or hate him, the guy pushes envelopes all day long which to me is a good thing, not a bad thing. I think that this article is right on and I totally agree that copyrights and patents last way too long to stimulate innovation and fairly compensate inventors. If the FCC is going to cater to those holding the monopolies, we are going to be making baby steps when we could be taking flying leaps…
Attack on Long Tail Anderson Theory
I think that it is really interesting that the research shows such a large amount of songs having NO consumer base whatsoever. Not arguing with the article, but I think an important nuance to Anderson’s theory is that it is somewhat built on the premise that shoppers have the resources and capabilities to gain perfect knowledge of the marketplace if they want to. In today’s world that scenario is rapidly approaching but the implied prerequisites for Anderson’s scenario are maybe not an empirical reality - leading to the divide between his theory and the data found by the research. As pandora and other music mining technologies evolve to reveal almost every single or album on the market, it’ll be interesting to see if the LT theory carries more weight.
