Steal This Web Page
I just finished a couple of good podcasts today: Voices in Your Head and Dale Dougherty – Web 2.0. Although not as spectacular as the Lawrence Lessig or Clayton Christensen podcasts, they're both still pretty good.
Voices in Your Head
The first one is with the founder of Magnatune Records, John Buckman. It's an interesting listen as it gives a little information on how screwed up the record industry is (not that we didn't know that already). Magnatune is based on a "try before you buy" or shareware model for music. You can listen to the streaming version of the music and purchase online at a price you set. The price for a CD is a minimum of $5 but apparently the average price people choose to pay is around $8. Half of that money goes to the artist from what I understand. You can also download immediately and have a CD shipped to you for an additional $4.97.
Besides the relatively unique business model, there are a few other tidbits that are interesting. They talk briefly about the fact that more and more, music is first heard in commercials or movies. It's getting to be less and less about the record company pimping and paying to get their artist's songs heard. I know the first place I heard Bif Naked's I Love Myself Today was in a Dodge truck commercial. I think it's a great song that seems to have missed out on commercial success (not sure why). Outside of the podcast, I'd also heard that Moby not only made tons of money off of licensing the songs for commercials, but they became a lot more popular afterward. Sell-out concerns aside, it seems to be another interesting way for artists to get their music heard and perhaps drive up their ticket sales (where more of their money is made anyway).
The podcast also mentions the fact that the single hit driving an album's sales might be endangered due to single song distribution sites like iTunes. A common practice is to bring in a bunch of hired guns (songwriter, producer, etc) and record one song that is a likely hit which sounds nothing like the rest of the album. In the past, you'd get the whole album and feel robbed. Now, you sample the other songs and decide to buy the single that you actually liked. They even mentioned people like Elvis Costello talking about recording and releasing songs one at a time rather than on albums–less pressure apparently. Buckman stated that he thought this would only be an option for established artists, though I disagree.
Web 2.0 – Dale Dougherty
The main thing I liked about this podcast was that Dale Dougherty talked about O'Reilly's Safari online bookshelf. The scenario that intrigued me was professors picking the most appropriate passages / chapters from various books on a subject they're teaching. They then arrange these into the combination they want and get it printed on demand. BAAAM! Instant custom textbook. This reminds me a great deal of the remix culture that Lawrence Lessig was talking about in The Comedy of the Commons.
In general, I think the days of content publishers raping content producers is coming to a rapid end. It's too easy to produce a song, a book, a movie, whatever on your home computer and then find a way to distribute it on the largest, most efficient distribution mechanism the world has ever known–the internet. The publishers add little or no value under the current model. In the past you could say they filtered out the crap for me but increasingly that doesn't stand up to the infamous Long Tail scenario. They need to revise the way they work and do something useful (and take a much smaller bite) if they want to survive, rather than suing 8 year old girls. The thing standing in the way of an avalanche of sweet, sweet content is less the issue of IP theft and more about middlemen that are too busy holding on to a dying way of making money off of exploited artists / content producers. If I were creative, I'd rather be read than bled. *rimshot*
Leave a Reply