I never really got into Todd Rundgren, but I read an interview that he did several (>10) years ago, where he admonished up-and-coming musicians to stop approaching their music as a product, and instead treat it like a service. Thus: Concerts, not CDs. His rationale was that people have to leave the house to come see you perform, whereas CDs, etc can be commodified - as as we now know, to such an extent as to render them virtually worthless as a revenue stream. Well, for the artists. I'm cynical enough to dismiss any corporate-level whinging as crocodile tears.

Clearly a man ahead of his time, regardless of whether anyone likes his music.

Check out this one about piracy and how pop stars in China cope with it:

http://mncc.com.my/ossig/lists/general/2003-03/msg00056.html

Scott, thanks for the inspiration. I've blogged about your conclusions and how this might point to a role for content creators and media brands in future HERE
Would welcome your thoughts.

Great post and discussion about the content business! What are magazines, newspapers, etc., however, if not highly refined mechanisms that use dead trees for aggregating content? What is Google? An online mechanism for aggregating content. A problem right now is that for all of its sophisticated algorithms and page-ranking abilities, Google is still an unsophisticated, blunt force method of retrieving information about a particular topic—but it does it really fast. A list of 1,900,000 discrete pieces of information about a topic delivered in 0.05 seconds is a neat trick, but not everyone wants to spend their time sorting out the wheat from the chaff. Having access to all the world’s information through the Internet means that those who analyze and package that information online in a meaningful and useful way are all the more important (disclaimer: I’m a content creator/packager!).

I love these theories as much as the next guy and don't even disagree. Content is no longer king. But what happens when everyone is an aggregator and no one is a producer? Why is no one worried about what happens to Google or Digg when all of the "good" sources of content go out of business? Newspapers and magazines are dying from lack of ads and Google's little ad service on their websites won't make up the difference. In the Western world and especially in the U.S., we have relied on content producers (press) as part of our democracy -- the fourth branch. So, what happens when all the newspapers die and Google aggregates nothing but spin?

Great post Scott. So aren't these "content platform and aggregation businessess" actually disaggregation businesses? One uses Google to find highly selective, granular content, not to find Orbitz. Perhaps it's only semantics, but once content business producers figure out how to monetize disaggregations on a large scale (and I have no reason to believe it will not happen), won't these "aggregation businesses" become redundant? Not that they'll disappear; only their profit margins.

I, for one, still don't believe that the fundamental valuation of "content" (aggregated or disaggregated) has undergone revolutionary changes. Whether the money is made off tours, merchandising, or guest appearances, the songs (the single -- isn't music history simply repeating itself) -- the content -- still drives the business. Take that away and you have NOTHING.

I have been considering this issue on my blog as well - inspired by a recent Wired article.

As for Jeff Rabhan's quote in the post, I wonder how many different SKUs he gets from a CD these days - ring tones, singles, cell phone wallpapers, etc? Maybe the CD sales are down, but I'll bet his industry has and will continue to make up for that downturn with new delivery methods.

I tend to agree with overseer - content is always necessary, its the delivery, pacakging and pricing that will be the challenges for publishers in the future.

Very interesting and provative as always Scott. If we take your conclusion as valid (and I think it is) then I wonder if the monetization of digital content will shift to content platforms and aggregators as you assert but also to "long tail" or niche content publishers. Take TechCrunch, for instance, a popular online publication with a very specific purpose and audience. I would think as eyeballs and advertisers continue to stream online, there will be room for the business of content to exist, though it will be moving a greater number of smaller channels.

I'm positive that someone (or someones) else has already articulated the above in a far more coherent way!

tree hugger,

Content filtering is a HUGE value creation opportunity -- Google and search are only the tip of the iceberg.

Overseer,

You raise a good question. But you're assuming that quality content needs to be produced by BIG businesses. It doesn't. Take Gigaom.com, for example. Om Malik is a smart, principled journalist who hired a small team of smart, principled journalists to create great content. I don't know how big Om's business will get, but I'd hardly call his output "spin." As for who's going to do the Fourth Estate work, like investigative journalism, in a disaggregated media world, that may become a nonprofit endeavor. Look at what NPR does, investigative stories, reporting from war zones, etc.

Ben,

how to monetize disaggregations on a large scale

But that's the rub, isn't it, especially with an advertising model. How does a content producer seperately monetize thousands of discrete content items? Oh, that's right -- with Google AdSense.

I agree that without content you have nothing -- good thing a lot of people are willing to great content without ambition to create a BIG business out of it (or even a business at all).

Eric,

Yes, content business will still exist, but they will either be small or in support of other businesses, like aggregation.

Scott - great post - you really nailed it. But I think you could take the point to its natural conclusion - a point I just made in my post riffing off of yours. The problem exists because clip culture rests on the assumption that one can simply create clips at will. But this is not the way creativity works.

The clip (the single, the best article in the magazine, and so on) is the best bit, generally. It's what the crowd has selected as the artistic moment worth highlighting. But artists don't just switch on and create 'clips' - they have to invest in and produce the whole piece in the hope that there will be a moment of artistic serendipity in that creation - the clip. If we give that away for free - the best bit - why would anyone buy the rest (unless they were a particularly avid fan)? Why give away the best and ask people to buy the worst?

Artistry requires that the artist invest in the process in the hopes of producing 'the clip' - the great single, the great photo, the great article - whatever. We need to pay for the whole to get the serendipity that produces the clip. Give it away, and no one buys the rest. If they don't buy the rest, we can't afford to produce it, and there will be no serendipity that produces the clip.

The answer lies in this question: What did our world look like before content became big business? Now imagine that world equipped with current technology, and you get a sense of what lies ahead.

But you won't find me crying over the demise of the content kings. I've been making my own content for years, for a select group of appreciative friends. I won't miss a thing in the future, and will welcome the rebirth of genuine community.

The kings are dying. Long live our content.

Scott, I couldn't agree more with your reply: "Content filtering is a HUGE value creation opportunity — Google and search are only the tip of the iceberg." But isn't content filtering just a more sophisticated method of aggregation? Traditional print publishers figured out the right package that would sell--lots of money to be made by figuring out the online analogy.

Rob,

That's a fantastic observation, which has significant ramifications for how this all plays out.

There's a novel by the Itallian novelist Italo Calvino called If On A Winter's Night A Traveler. I contains the opening chapters to ten different novels, all of which make you believe that there is an entire novel behind them, even though the rest of each novel was never actually written. But's it clear that Calvino had to have thought through the entire plot and character for each of the ten novels to make the first chaper of each work.

It's a work of heroic art. But an effort, as you point out, that we're not likely to see reproduced in Hollywood.

Scott, you have a point. I do see real journalists producing quality content online today. But they're not taking down presidents. And I also see "citizen journalists" falling for the the oldest PR tricks in the books and being gamed by politicos, flaks and marketers. Not to mention blogs owned by companies with financial interests in the outcomes their content can generate. Right now, newspapers investigate issues under a set of rules that at least try to guarantee that the story is true and free of bias. NPR hasn't done an investiative piece that I can recall. TV and radio just don't do it. I don't have the answer, but if the consensus is that content isn't worth paying for because it is all free on Google, then we are in trouble. Up to this point in our history, journalists have been our watchdogs. If we disintermediate them, we have no replacement.

It's all about controlling the channel. It's not that the content has no value now, it's that there's no way to protect the content. The best example I can think of to illustrate this point is with Real Estate listings. I know this because I've been recently looking at buying a house. If you go onto MLS.com, MLS.ca or a private sale website and you see all that fantastic information on there, you think, 'Why do I need an agent? Everything I need is right here!' Not exactly, the good content - the listings that don't make it to the public site because they're sold behind the scenes - are restricted in access to Real Estate Agnts who send controlled links to their buyers that expire after a week or two. Only Real Estate Agents get access to that info. You might think, well, once you have the listing, you could post it - no because that info changes almost daily - so once the link expires, you don't know what's happening behind the scenes. Thus, the content is of value and ... it is protected. The same is true of music. It's not that music has suddenly become without value it's that there's no way to protect it at the moment. You might say 'Duh! Of course! Tell me something I don't know. If the only way that the music industry will recover is if tighter constraints on musical content, how could that be achieved?'

It seems impossible at the moment, but as ways to restrict and control access and distribute information become more accepted, it will get harder and harder to openly trade music. A recent example of this for me was of a television show I watch. A commercial during the show said 'See all the old episodes on NBC.com' You could go there and download them. However, if you go there and you weren't using a US IP, you couldn't download it. Sure, I could go online and look it up on a sharing network where some unscrupulous US person had uploaded it and then download it there, but the point is, that constraint never used to exist. If something on a Web site was there, I could download it from ANYWHERE. Now, they check where you live, and block you. Imagine they also check outbound traffic, so if you tried to upload a file to a site like torrentspy, they block you. Those constraints will grow.

The transfer of files and what people do online will become more trackable. Actually, it already is pretty trackable, but it will become more acceptable. Just like in the old days - there never used to be *69 or call display. In the movies, you used to have to keep someone on the phone long enough for them to run a trace, but now you know who it is before you pick up the phone. Making phony phone calls is a lot tougher to do. Same will be true of transfering data. Quotas will kick in for large data transfers - some ISP's already do charge for over a certain amount of data transfer per month. In future, you can imagine people will need to have to have licenses to move large volumes of data online and, if you don't have one, they will look into what it is you're moving and investigate.

It's sort of like tracking Grow Ops for drugs. They run heat vision from helicopters to monitor houses emitting large quantities of heat and then investigate to see if they've tampered with electricity meters and then investigate to see if they're running hydroponic lamps to grow pot.

Tracking volume by IP and things like DOI (digital object identifiers) and their distribution will be monitored and it will get tougher and tougher. There will always, of course, be a pirate networks, but the ability to track and administer control it will grow. As it does, the incentive to trade content illegally will diminish and the content will regain value. How do we know this? Simple economics! As long as something has value, which music does, somebody will find a way to make money on it. Count on it!

I for one am confident that content is not only a good business but a great business. The internet has yet to see that tremendous amout money that can be generated with content. The biggest problem the content ownwers have to face is piracy. I feel piracy is the reason for the lack of growth in the content delivery revenue model.

Also the misunderstanding or lack knowledge of the customer's needs or atleast the "we don't care" attitude to understand what the customer wants are is the main reason piracy is here to stay.

I have a relationship with a company in upstate NY that has what many feel will be the real world solution to on line piracy and when they release thier platform the content business will go through the roof. My thoughts for the entertainment industry, hold off on contracts with the wanna be solutions. Keep your eyes open for a company that will introduce themselves as mMedia. Then come back on and tell me that the content business is dead or dying.

T