Saturday, May 03, 2008

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet

Jeff Jarvis on the Decade Delta:

iTunes is 5 years old this week. The seb internet turned 15 yesterday. The decade delta between those dates is the generous amount of time the music industry had to save itself from the fate that overcame it … and didn’t. In these five years, iTunes has sold more than 4 billion songs. Think of how many songs the music industry could have sold us if only they’d gone with the flow of new opportunities and given us the chance instead of persecuting us and resisting reality while trying to preserve outdated business models based on outmoded technology.


3 comments:

Olive said...

Hmmm. Think about the hardware you were running 15 years ago. The speed of your internet connection. How much you were paying to connect to the internet. Would a fully digital music distribution model have been viable then?

Simon Hayes Budgen said...

Admittedly not - but six years ago; eight years ago; even ten years ago there was the opportunity.

I think Jarvis' point is more that for a small investment a decade ago, the majors could (and should have) had their strategy and presence in place. They ignored the threat, and have been paying the price ever since

Olive said...

That's certainly true, and perhaps the music industry should've seen the way things were moving- hardware and bandwidth were only gotting cheaper, and the first MP3 players started appearing 10 years ago.
Instead of ignoring the threat, perhaps they could've forged an alliance with an iconic hardware manufacturer, integrating the whole purchasing experience into a slick package...
That said, the music industry has always had a lousy relationship with technology, although I've noticed that the tech that it clings to today is the same tech that it castigated the yesterday.

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