This topic never seems to go away… I have written quite a few blog posts on this, which were usually responses to blog posts of Michael Arrington, Chris Anderson, Fred Wilson, etc. Strangely, they are my favorite bloggers and I respect other perspectives of them a lot.
(Especially, I thought initial ‘Free’ article on Wired’s Chris Anderson, whose The Long Tail I liked a lot and translated into the Korean edition, was too much stretch. Recently, his ideas sound much more reasonable (but less controversial, which may not be good for marketing). Maybe I misunderstood his first article.)
Put shortly, I believe that creators should be free to make their music sold for a price or distributed for free. And we should respect it, which becomes an agreement when you get the content, in using the content. In this situation, it is up to people to figure out working business models. And I believe we will.
I don’t think there can be only one universal business model. Some people seem to believe that ‘free’ digital contents is a must and the job of the music industry is to figure out the extra piece to make money. But why remove possibilities of other business models? If it turns out that free + alpha is the best model, good they were insightful. But let’s not restrict the degree of innovation freedom beforehand.
3 years ago