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The downward spiral of ownership and value (happened to music, books are next)

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Re: The downward spiral of ownership and value (happened to music, books are next)

#61

Post by Retric »

bad_user wrote: post #4
DennisP wrote: post #3

The article talks about how the music industry is shrinking, but says nothing about musicians. Musicians who embrace the new reality are doing fine. What the Internet is really doing away with is a giant industry that used to be useful, but now is merely parasitic. The same is happening to the book publishing industry. We don't really need them anymore. Instead of giving $15 to a publisher who then gives $1.50 to the…

What the Internet is really doing away with is a giant industry that used to be useful, but now is merely parasitic. That can go both ways: the Internet is also breeding a generation of customers that used to value and support music & books, but now is merely parasitic. we can just give $1.50 to the author directly I'm all for eliminating middle-men, but free is still a whole lot better than $1.50; and when downloadi…

For cost books have been competing with at cost books for a long time. The reality is reading 50$ worth of books takes far longer than listening to 50$ worth of music. So while I could download 500,000 books tonight I can read them fast enough for that to be a meaningful activity.

PS: At the sub 3$ a book range there is little reason to pirate. I tip waiters more than that let alone entertain me for a few hours.

Re: The downward spiral of ownership and value (happened to music, books are next)

#62

Post by loewenskind »

_delirium wrote: post #53
loewenskind wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there are quite a few people who love what they do so much that they're actually willing to subsidize their own art-production by working other jobs (e.g. waiting tables). Do you really see this as a good thing? When the only way to make money is to do something that can't be given away and anything digital must be given away?

I don't think it has to do with digital or non-digital. It has to do with the fact that people like forming bands, making music, writing poetry, etc. They like it so much that many of them---even people who are good at it---would be willing to do it even if they didn't make any money at it. Hence, it's hard to charge a high price for labor that people are willingly oversupplying. Contrast with waiting tables, where p…

>Hence, it's hard to charge a high price for labor that people are willingly oversupplying.

Not strictly true. Thanks to digital camera availability there are a near infinite amount of people willing to do your family portrait but I suspect you'll have no issue with paying to have it done.

>Contrast with waiting tables, where people do not enjoy doing it enough to do it for free. If there were a lot of people who loved it so much that they were willing to wait tables for free in their spare time, wages would probably go down there too...

That sounds like an incredibly awful world to live in where people can only get paid for things that no one likes doing and everything fun has to be given away. I mean, I don't mind doing what I love to do for free so long as I don't have to pay for food, rent, etc.

Re: The downward spiral of ownership and value (happened to music, books are next)

#63

Post by dagw »

_delirium wrote: post #35
davidw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh? Who pays up front? I think it's anything but "simple". There's a big incentive to free ride and let someone else pay.

"Anyone who wants to" is one model, perhaps with some goodies thrown in for those who do. A bunch of musicians have been using that in various forms for the past decade or so (e.g. http://www.neubauten.org/?q=supporters-english ), and Kickstarter now sort of formalizes it.

Blixa and Neubauten have a large and loyal fanbase from the decades they spent making music the 'old' way. Thus they (like NiN and Radiohead) can skip the hard "build a captive audience" step necessary for something like that to work. A new band no one has heard of is going to have a much harder time making something like that work, so as such it's not really comparable.

Re: The downward spiral of ownership and value (happened to music, books are next)

#64

Post by DennisP »

davidw wrote: post #39
DennisP wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same wikipedia article also lists a variety of methods to overcome the problem.

Yes, all of which have various strong and weak points. For instance, light houses are generally constructed by governments. Do you want the government to be in charge of who gets paid to write or make music? I'm not a libertarian, but I don't really like that idea. Intellectual property is another listed solution that, despite recent problems, has worked pretty well. As of late, enforcement costs may be exceeding ben…

Assurance contracts are the one I'm mainly interested in.

Re: The downward spiral of ownership and value (happened to music, books are next)

#65

Post by _delirium »

dagw wrote: post #63
_delirium wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Anyone who wants to" is one model, perhaps with some goodies thrown in for those who do. A bunch of musicians have been using that in various forms for the past decade or so (e.g. http://www.neubauten.org/?q=supporters-english ), and Kickstarter now sort of formalizes it.

Blixa and Neubauten have a large and loyal fanbase from the decades they spent making music the 'old' way. Thus they (like NiN and Radiohead) can skip the hard "build a captive audience" step necessary for something like that to work. A new band no one has heard of is going to have a much harder time making something like that work, so as such it's not really comparable.

I agree it's not easy to pull off with no starting fan base, but isn't that true of breaking into the industry the old way too? An unknown band with no fan base is not going to have an easy time convincing an RIAA label to sign them and put out their album. I'm not sure their current problem (put out demos, find fans) is actually harder or lower-probability than the older problem was (put out demos, impress A/R person).

Re: The downward spiral of ownership and value (happened to music, books are next)

#66

Post by oiujyhgtfrt »

metageek wrote: post #16

The article cites the decline in music sales, but ignores the fact that a large part of the music sales in the 90s was people buying CDs of albums they already owned--an artificial bubble which burst independently of any increase in illegal copying.

The music industries real problem is not having a new format that they can resell you all the same albums on for 5x the price.

Or it could just be piracy!

For example UK cinema attendances fell from 1.6Bn/year in the 1940s to 55M/year in the early 80s - this was entirely sue to people seeing the future of being able to download movies - and not due to the crap films produced in the 70s and 80s.

Re: The downward spiral of ownership and value (happened to music, books are next)

#67

Post by oiujyhgtfrt »

forensic wrote: post #59
ghaff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The (hypothesized--I think it was Tim O'Reilly who has written about this) issue though is that, with books, time is much more of a limiting factor with books than with songs or simple iThing games. Even if an author makes substantially more per copy with an eBook, there's a limit in how many more copies they'll sell even at a much lower price; people only have time to read so many more books. I'm not arguing it's al…

Since the invention of e-books and digital audiobooks I probably buy 3-10 times more of these. Audiobooks in particular, of the on-demand variety where I can instantly get them on my iPhone through the Audible app, have led to me reading a HELL of a lot more. It's easy and convenient. eBooks also help because I buy more books and search through them. I can also read them on mobile devices while I take a shit in publi…

The problem at the moment is that the publishers are marketing eBooks as a new luxury product to a niche of rich techies who but iPads on a whim.

SO an eBook costs the same as the hardback - screwing you. But the contract with the author has the same clauses charging them a percentage of buy-backs and printing faults or damaged copies as the paper version - screwing them.

The publishers need to realize the game has changed - and quickly unless they want to end up like the record business

Re: The downward spiral of ownership and value (happened to music, books are next)

#68

Post by hxa7241 »

The article seems confused, or stuck in obsolete ways of thinking.

The real purpose is not to pay for 'books'. It is not to 'protect' author's 'rights. It is not to have 'ownership. The purpose here is to pay for production of books. Production does not essentially depend on 'ownership' or 'rights' at all.

Books are data. You do not 'own' data in the normal sense. It is an abundance, it is infinitely copyable. Gluing together the ideas of books and ownership no longer makes much sense. And similarly for 'rights': they were a practical means of funding production in a material world, but now they are not.

It is somewhat reasonable to observe the apparent lack of confirmed business model for funding book production in an internet world. But the undertone that we are slipping into doom and dread is funny when you think about it. Are we losing something? Has the internet taken something away? No, it has given us something. We do not have less now, we have more. So, we need new ways to organise ourselves and production. Why is that such an impossible thing to imagine? We can build the internet, but we cannot re-arrange what we do a little? We should have at least an iota of confidence in human capability.

You hardly even need optimism: simply look around. We have had at least a decade of 'piracy' of music. Oh no! Surely the world must have collapsed! Ask yourself: do you have less music to enjoy now than before? I very much doubt it. There is more music now than ever.

This whole 'end of the world' fantasy is largely just industry FUD. Stop perpetuating it, and instead celebrate the internet and think of ways to use it to do more than before.

Re: The downward spiral of ownership and value (happened to music, books are next)

#69

Post by henryfarbles »

ckcheng wrote: post #55
CWuestefeld wrote: post #42

Musicians have always relied on other revenue sources. Performance is the big one, but merchandise and licensing matter too. Authors don’t have the same options. Dickens engineered a profitable reading tour of the United States, as new-model enthusiasts always point out. But how many authors could do that today? The author never really addresses his own question, leaving us to assume that authors couldn't generally s…

> books were sold by subscription, with sections serialized and delivered periodically Isn't that like what Manning does with its MEAP (early access program)? http://www.manning.com/

Most comics are still distributed that way as well.

Re: The downward spiral of ownership and value (happened to music, books are next)

#70

Post by hxa7241 »

tree_of_item wrote: post #19
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #5

> The role of piracy. I think we know. And the trends are negative, for both readers and authors. Except that the role of piracy is anything but clearcut. As Tim O'Reilly famously said in 2002 [1]: "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy." Again and again over the past several years, we have seen both studies and anecdotal stories from artists finding that file sharing produced…

The author quotes Tim O'Reilly and shows why he isn't necessarily correct. > Don’t need to take my word for it. Just look at all the other industries that have gone digital. Take music. Physical music sales have been declining steadily for more than a decade, and while digital sales rise, they make up only a fraction of the loss. (They’re not even rising much anymore either.) Revenue from Pandora, Spotify, YouTube ad…

But whether the industry is shrinking, or sales are down, is not really the question. That is really what the industries themselves care about. The important thing is whether we, the public, have sufficient production, which is a somewhat different thing.

And various measures show production has not fallen, in fact it has risen, significantly. One example: http://www.unifr.ch/controlling/seminar/2009-2010/oberholzer... . And does it seem like we have less music, films, books now? It seems quite the opposite to me. If we are currently living through 'the worst case scenario' and an industry 'a fraction of its previous size', we seem to be doing pretty damn well.

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