![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thatcrazycajunWith thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
khaosworks for pointing me in this direction via Facebook: Condé Nast Portfolio's website has a suite of very interesting articles on the struggle to find a replacement for an old-media business model being rapidly eaten away by the rise of the Internet. It's a problem three media industries share: newspapers, TV networks/film studios and music recording labels.
Some artists and producers, most notably Radiohead, Jimmy Buffett and a young fellow from South Korea named Jin-Young Park, seem to have hit on the way to make a living (and a quite nice one) from making music without actually selling it on traditional albums: sell everything else connected with the listening experience, i.e., concert tickets, memorabilia, special-edition "live" CDs/DVDs and so forth. Once perfect copies of studio song performances can be made in near-infinite quantity and rapidly distributed worldwide for next to no cost or effort—and downloaded for free by the zillions, largely with impunity from detection or prosecution—the value shifts to these other things that can't be so easily reproduced.
Park, when asked where he's from, always answers somewhat hubristically, "I'm from the future." As his profit numbers go soaring up and the US-based major labels' go plummeting down, it looks more and more like not being so boastful a statement after all. And the US labels, if they cherish even the tiniest hope of being a part of that future—or indeed, of having any sort of a future at all—are going to have to pay very, very close attention to him...and a whole lot less to the niceties of existing copyright law.
khaosworks for pointing me in this direction via Facebook: Condé Nast Portfolio's website has a suite of very interesting articles on the struggle to find a replacement for an old-media business model being rapidly eaten away by the rise of the Internet. It's a problem three media industries share: newspapers, TV networks/film studios and music recording labels.Some artists and producers, most notably Radiohead, Jimmy Buffett and a young fellow from South Korea named Jin-Young Park, seem to have hit on the way to make a living (and a quite nice one) from making music without actually selling it on traditional albums: sell everything else connected with the listening experience, i.e., concert tickets, memorabilia, special-edition "live" CDs/DVDs and so forth. Once perfect copies of studio song performances can be made in near-infinite quantity and rapidly distributed worldwide for next to no cost or effort—and downloaded for free by the zillions, largely with impunity from detection or prosecution—the value shifts to these other things that can't be so easily reproduced.
Park, when asked where he's from, always answers somewhat hubristically, "I'm from the future." As his profit numbers go soaring up and the US-based major labels' go plummeting down, it looks more and more like not being so boastful a statement after all. And the US labels, if they cherish even the tiniest hope of being a part of that future—or indeed, of having any sort of a future at all—are going to have to pay very, very close attention to him...and a whole lot less to the niceties of existing copyright law.
