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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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