"Netflix Beats BitTorrent’s Bandwidth"

And who says the public doesn’t want subscription services…

Who wants some Blockbuster stock?

The public doesn’t know what it wants in the future.  It’s the obligation of technologists and content providers to bring them there.

Streaming movies on your iPad…it’s a beautiful thing.

Maybe music subscription streaming services were too early.  Maybe they were crippled by an industry that refused to actively license them.  That doesn’t mean they won’t win in the future.  The public rented videotapes, then bought DVDs, then rented DVDs and are now streaming movies.  The public is malleable.

But music services have an advantage over Netflix.  You don’t have to stream all the content, 2,000+ tracks live on the handheld, just like you own them, with no dropouts, no cloud connection necessary.

Netflix needed broadband and the ability to stream to your TV to break through.  iPad streaming is just icing on the cake.

Rhapsody started before broadband was ubiquitous.  Now high speed connections are de rigueur.  Stream music to people. And know that it’s not about streaming on the desktop, music is free on the desktop, via YouTube (however unauthorized), it’s about streaming to the handheld.  Is the music industry gonna screw up once again, and allow sideloading and cloud delivery of what you have already purchased to its economic detriment?

Looks like it.

Idiots.

"Amazon.com selling more e-books than printed books"

Wanna know why?

Price and convenience.

Although the publishers stupidly insisted on an agency model, driving up prices, e-books are still almost always cheaper than physical books.  And one Kindle is lighter than one book.  And it can hold tons of books and runs for eons.

Outsiders drive innovation.  Amazon built the e-book business, not the publishers.  The future of the music industry will be driven by outsiders.

And despite all the carping that people love books, the smell, the heft, the collection, it appears more people, at least those buying at Amazon, want price and convenience.

Meanwhile, Amazon keeps driving down the price of the device.  As did Apple.  But the music industry insisted Apple raise prices at the iTunes Store.  How stupid.  You want to make everybody a customer.  Tell me again about the value of music when I can get unlimited streaming of movies via Netflix for less $7.99 a month?  (Sure, it’s not every movie, but it will be, and the price will probably go up, after people have been hooked.  That’s how you do it, like a dope dealer, you start cheap, get people addicted, then they continue to pay at an increased price, they’ve got no choice, they need the hit.)

Roseanne on fame, TV and feminism

This is SO good, you should drop everything you’re doing and read it right now.

Doesn’t matter if you hate Roseanne.  Doesn’t matter if you watched her show.

She’s talking about fame.  And control.  And both issues are important in music.

In the late sixties and early seventies, the musicians gained control from the labels.  The labels took this back in the last twenty years, to their ultimate detriment.  If you think a label knows creativity, you probably think Paris Hilton can sing.

Artists are insane, but they know best.  And you mess with them at your peril.

And if you think fame solves your problems, and that it’s not fleeting, read about Roseanne and the Palm…

In other words, Charlie Sheen may have been insane, but he was right.

More Netflix

It’s not about eradicating P2P, it’s about providing a better solution.  People will pay for convenience.  So you need a seamless service that makes stealing look like a pain in the ass.

More Roseanne

There’s limited bandwidth in TV, i.e. only 500 channels.

And TV is expensive to produce.

There’s no limit on distribution in music.  And it’s cheap to produce.

Which is why the major labels are ceding market share, the future of the business, to indies.

And the book business isn’t far behind…