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He's right, Dave. So qui bono?
"iTunes is Web 2.0ish in this sense. Finally you can buy individual songs
instead of having
to buy whole albums. The recording industry hated the idea and resisted it
as long as possible.
But it was obvious what users wanted, so Apple flew under the labels. [4]
Though really it
might be better to describe iTunes as Web 1.5. Web 2.0 applied to music
would probably mean
individual bands giving away DRMless songs for free." - Paul Graham
http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html
Umm.. if you are on the production side of this instead of the consuming
side, you would
notice that the last sentence is right precisely and only because iTunes
will sell
you individual songs, BUT <strong>they don't accept songs from individual
artists</strong>.
They make artists deal with middleGuys who deal with them. The middleGuys
only deal with artists who make
CDs (no submission of individual tunes) and has representation in the form
of a label that
represents many artists and they do this for tadaaaa: a percentage.
It only took a few years for the bad old business model to reconstitute
itself on the web
and Apple made that happen: volitionally. Good guys? Think again.
Business people
with a market to conquer. Lots of little bites making one big bite into the
product
with no value added but to say 'yes'.
Outcome: Big artists are still a product of marketing. Street musicians and
garage bands are
still street musicians and garage bands. The only real improvement is they
can
pick the corner and the cost of recording is time and a few thousand bucks
for gear.
So if you pass one othem, toss a few coins in the hat and they'll toss back
a few
DRMless mp3s which by fact of giving them away, reduced their economic value
to zero.
So artists are what they always were: meat. Smart ones build their own Web
2.0
web sites and have Paypal or its ilk anyway. The rest of us do it for boo.
What does Web 2.0 mean? It means exactly what the market always means: the
same
people get to make money again for the same software except this time it
will be
cheaper, come in smaller boxes, and do less than it did last time which
means you
will buy/download/subscribe to more to get the same. But this time, when it
gets
obsoleted, you will change like it or not. You may not notice, and you won't
have to hunt through
your old CDs for the backups but if you lose your credit card number, it
won't matter
anyway because they don't know your name, just your credit card number.
Progress for the same reasons for the same people: items based on scarcity
may not
be interesting to investors, but scarce capital is everyone's problem. The
ownership
society never acknowledges that and that is Graham's social network.
Standards for protocols for web applications: think XSD. What does it cost
to think
again? As I said on my blog, if you really intend to have fewer web
languages, you
better get the right ones up front or you have co-opted into mediocrity and
bloat.
What you can't download for free, you have to license. Think what you like,
but
Microsoft is right about that. If you want them to field openDoc, you have
to
vote with your wallet. It IS about procurement.
"All the gold in California is in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills
In somebody else's name..." The Gatlin Brothers.
len
From: Dave Pawson [mailto:davep@dpawson.co.uk]
As usual, Paul puts a sensible head on this.
http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html
I'd love to disagree with him... but can't.
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