Sunday, November 14, 2004

Do I hear $500? Can somebody give me $600? $60,000?

I'm being an auctioneer this afternoon. A first. Wish me luck.

After that I'm off to Apachecon for speaking gig. See ya there.

See faster

Dan Bricklin is getting fiber to his home.

Same clues, bigger stick

Mark Cuban: When will the music industry do it right? His key recommendation:

There are solutions that are simple. Learn a lesson from the cable and phone industry. Go to where people already are paying for digital access to your product, and for a little bit more money, give them a more product, legally and easily.

Why in the world haven’t you gone to AOL, Cable and DSL providers and offered your catalogs by genre for 10 or 20c per month, per subscriber? Universal, take a lesson from your NBC/Universal pals. Create a rock channel, an 80s rock channel, a hip hop channel, an oldies channel, etc, etc. Put your catalogs for each genre channel on a server that you control. Go to AOL, et al. Offer their users access to DRM protected music that gives them the same rights as ITunes or the MSN store or whatever makes you feel good at night rights. Price each channel cheap enough that all the broadband or dialup ISPs can package them in marketable solutions with the other labels. Its a no brainer sale. AOL et al, send out emailers and promotions.. “Want the latest rock hits from artists like xxxxxx ? AOL brings you legal peer to peer. Download all you want, check us every day because we add more music every day.

It’s the Rock Download Channel from AOL and its only 1 buck per month on your AOL bill. Click here, and you can start now... (billing is for a minimum of 12 months) Of course there is also the oldies channel, the hip hop channel. The old school hip hop channel, the R&B channel. However many ways you can dice and slice your music, thats a buck a month. Per channel. Per Sub.

Consumers will do it because its easy, safe and cheap. We are used to being sold "1 more channel," or "1 more tier" or "call waiting for an extra 99 cents per month." We will commit to five channels per month at a buck each for a year before we would ever commit to spending $60 on CDs at a sitting.

I love Mark, but he's still stuck in the producer-to-consumer mindset. Peer-to-peer is winning precisely because it's not more of The Usual from the Usual Suspects. What we need is a new industry to grow out of the marketplace where people who make and listen to music gather to share art and make culture. This is a place, not a distribution system. The conceptual difference is profound. When all you see is piping, you think the whole world is plumbing. But in music it isn't, and never was. It just happened to go through a period where it looked like plumbing. Now it's returning to its natural state. There's money to be made here, in the marketplace. But only by respecting the nature of the place, rather than the efficiencies of the old top-down system.

DIY goes gallactic

Got a brilliant comment to a post I put up yesterday at IT Garage, in response to this post at Indexed Forever. Suddenly they realise they're free from schedulers. One provocative paragraph:

If the current trend to separate the data- and presentation- layers of the Internet continues, and it's hard to imagine what could stop it, then it's possible to see a time when the currently ubiquitous browser may not be the the universal, or even the majority, way of accessing the Internet. How about a DIY presentation layer? Imagine an end to waiting for a site's ads to download, just so you can view the little bit of content that's squeezed between all the corporate messages? Or a newspaper that's custom published for you, but which also includes moving pictures, or articles that explain themselves if you don't understand first time around?

The money 'graf:

DIY isn't just an IT thing, it's a natural side effect of personal empowerment. In fact it may be the essential precursor to personal empowerment.

Read the whole thing.