12/01/2010
» Nope Yer Wrong.
Because something use to have value, doesn’t mean it must continue to have value in perpetuity. Just ask Saab, the guy that signed Vanilla Ice and Microsoft’s Operating Systems Business.
Also, your metaphores are bad — the answer to VHS was never betamax, it was DVD and we’ve all figured out that the answer to DVD isn’t blue ray, it’s streaming video — that’s why most blue ray players already have that capability built in.
The media industry and many of its beneficiaries continue to propagate the lie that the businesses they established were about the physical items — records, cds, vhs tapes, dvds, books, newspapers, etc. They tried to convince you wanted to own the album, when you just wanted to hear the songs.
Bullshit. I don’t really want a pile of plastic discs, I want to be able to listen to a song or watch movie on-demand. The distribution system is as irrelevant as answering machines in a world with free voice mail — when they figure out a way to beam this stuff right into your brain and bypass your ears and eyes plasma TVs and all the audiophile equipment won’t have any value either.
There are relevant questions to be asked here, I just never hear anyone asking them (and haven’t for the 10-years I’ve been rewriting this post).
1. How do artists afford to keep making more art when getting a cut of the distribution system isn’t a viable solution anymore? (Notice you never see authors/publishers attacking libraries, the original analog peer to peer network — yes those networks do pay the rights holders, but apart from a minor tax burden the end user doesn’t. How Libraries are a public service and file sharing is a felony, is a question to ask your member of congress.)
2. Journalism has value to society, in particular as a check on public and private institutions that wield social, economic and political power. How do we promote journalism and support journalists when again, their ability to get a cut of distribution is limited?
3. What roles in society need to continue to be staffed by full-time professionals? Some manufacturing and office jobs become outmoded by technology, why should arts and letters be any different? There’s a value in good arts and culture criticism — but it’s been previously funded by the distribution based industries it was reviewing — as that continues it collapse, do we need professional critics? I think the same question could be asked of authors, poets, song writers, musicians, producers, publishers and most of the fine arts. I’m not saying I don’t want people to make a full-time living at that stuff (public funding would be fine with me for content producers) — I just don’t think those people are in any position to fully dictate the terms of engagement with their consumers and customers (as they essentially have for the past 100-years). Consumers will negotiate with you, but don’t be surprised when they walk away from the negotiation if you can’t make it worth their time.
4. Not a question but an attitude that permeates the old way of thinking where content producers expected to be plucked from obscurity and given fame and wealth. Let me sum that up as follows:
I’m just an artist, I don’t have time to figure out how I am going to support myself, I just want to focus on writing songs.
Fuck you and sing me a song before I get bored. Do something of value or I will spend money with someone who is up to that minor challenge.
Link posted at 13:10
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