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July 01, 2005

Dan Bricklin on tools, media, and an astounding Rhapsody fact

Dan muses that the new media are actually tools, unlike the old media which were and are media. You could quibble with Dan that blogging software is to blogs and wiki software is to wikis as studios are to TV, i.e., that there are tools involved in all these cases. But then you'd be missing Dan's point, which is not a quibble but quite a big one. To me, Dan is presenting the analog to the argument that the Internet is primarily about voices and conversations. Of course, I would think that since it fits nicely with the "argument" I made at all three presentations I gave over the past two days that blogs are not media.

In the course of this post, Dan writes:

In an interview with Larry Magid on ITConversations, RealNetwork's Rob Glaser said [at minute 2:45] that in a given month over 90% of Rhapsody's one million songs are played at least once and the top 100 songs make up only 1% of the listens.

Wow. [Technorati tags: DanBricklin media rhapsody]

Posted by D. Weinberger at July 1, 2005 04:52 PM

Comments

And that's just the 1 million that are available. These sorts of stats strongly suggest that there is merit in digitizing and making available the *entire* back catalogue of every piece of music ever recorded.

We need the equivalent of the Gutenberg project and Google's attempt to digitise the world's libraries but aimed at audio and video. And we need to shame the copyright holders into doing the same for all the audio and video that they are hoarding.

Posted by: Julian Bond | July 2, 2005 04:28 AM

Sorry, "Shame" was the wrong word. It should be "convince them that there is profit in". At which point we run headlong into the price issue.

Intuitively it makes no sense that a track from the back catalogue that hasn't been available on CD for years should be the same price as a multi-million seller from a top band that has just been released.

So take the Allofmp3.com model. Any encoding you want with no DRM, charged for bandwidth used. Set the pricing at $1 for 3 months from release, $0.50 for 9 months and then $0.10 ever after (for a typical 192K VBR MP3). Stock *every* track you can lay your hands on with an inventory *at least* as big as Amazon's. You want to bet that wouldn't make money?

Posted by: Julian Bond | July 2, 2005 04:36 AM

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