Gary Robinson, the head of Emergent Music has an article on his blog about the Three Steps To Freedom. His opinion on this definitely counts, because EM might very well be the future of music. I’m going to chime in with my thoughts here and copy them over to EM’s forum as well.
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Archive for April, 2002Computer maker Gateway is reportedly trying the music business on for size. I’m all for this… here’s a multi-billion dollar company looking to get into music with no legacy to deal with, which leaves it open for trying all sorts of business models. C|Net has a story about RIAA testimony in front of Congress, in which they ask for more money to be applied to catching pirates. From earlier writing of mine, you can see that I don’t think much of how the RIAA is handling their monopoly in the face of new technology. However, they do own the copyrights and the law should be upheld until it is changed. I would like to see an alternate music industry build up that is more consumer friendly. That is well within the law to do. Just traced a link to Emergent Music, which is a really spiffy collaborative filtering site for finding new music. This is the future, folks. There’s a lot more value there than what we get from the Majors. I hope Emergent Music and something I’m working on get along well. SFGate has a great article that describes how to stop laws like the DMCA, etc. from getting passed henceforth. The suggestion: rather than donate small sums to prop up congresspeople that do a good thing, donate large sums to make examples of small numbers of congressfolk, by supporting their opponents and getting them out of office. I wonder when Senator Disney, er, Hollings is up for re-election? As media conglomerates go, Bertelsmann is among the most savvy. They invested in AOL and partnered in AOL Europe before AOL’s biggest explosion of growth (and then cashed in at a good time). They invested in Napster when it was still hot, an investment that has not borne fruit but does show that they think about the future instead of just trying to protect their current revenue model. Now, the NY Times reports that Bertelsmann may be interested in buying all of Napster, claiming that a for-pay Napster service could still be the most successful. CNN talks about the new Dataplay media format, which is a 1-inch disc housed in a small plastic cartridge. The advantage of Dataplay is that it is considerably smaller than a 5-inch CD. The disadvantages are: the discs hold a total of 500MB when using both sides (compared to 650MB on one side of a CD), the music is stored in a compressed format so it is not of as high quality as a CD, the music has copy controls so you can’t rip it and play it on your computer, you have to get all new players for them (which, of course, cost $300 since they’re new technology) and the price of prerecorded music on Dataplay is the same as prerecorded CDs. Business 2.0 has an article that sums up the battle between tech companies and media companies. Though the tech companies undoubtedly have their own interests at heart, thank God someone is on the same side as the consumers. C|Net talks about fan remixes of music and fans who combine multiple songs into one. I’ve heard a couple of these and they can be nifty… Years ago, I thought that an information exchange would be a powerful tool. People ask questions, other people supply answers… Google now has a beta of such a service People state how much they’re willing to pay for answers to their questions, and the Researcher that answers gets 75% of the money. (Google takes $0.50 listing fee plus the other 25%). I’m really happy to see the Google folks taking novel, user-friendly approaches to generating revenue. No pop-up, gigantic Flash ads. |
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