ZeuBlog

What Did The Music Industry Teach Us, Really?

By Kevin Walsh

After speaking with an analyst the other day about “movie studios not wanting to go the way of the music industry” I got to thinking about what it was, really, that the music industry taught us. This is especially important because it seems that the music industry (record labels actually) is increasingly used to defend questionable and often desperate practices by newspapers, cable operators, and television and movie studios. Just Bing (I no longer Google) “newspaper” “demise of” and “record labels” and you’ll see what I mean.

But while the music industry has a lot to teach us, the main lesson had to do with the packaging of its products. Basically, they took a bunch of songs, put them in a box, and forced you to buy the box. This despite the fact that you often wanted only one or two songs in the box. (By the way, I also believe CDs were a clever ploy to kill off the weak link in the songs-in-a-box strategy—the 45 (and I know I’m dating myself by saying this)). What killed the traditional music industry business model was not the internet per se, it was the availability of an easy to use system that allowed people to buy individual songs (i.e., Apple’s iTunes/iPod combo). Yes, this combo could not have existed without the internet but until Apple came along MP3 downloads were the domain of poor university students.

The FCC’s Broadband Strategy for Rural America

By Kevin Walsh

Was it just me or did it look like the FCC woke up on the morning of May 27 and say, “Oh heck,” (well, they probably said something other than “heck”), “we’re supposed to submit our Broadband Strategy for Rural America report today!” and quickly threw together bits and pieces of off-the-shelf recommendations that had been lying around. While I admit that I handled many college papers in much the same manner, this was not a homework assignment; this was a mandate placed upon the FCC by Congress as part of the 2008 Farm Bill. The result of the FCC’s report was summed up best by Teresa Mastrangelo at broadbandtrends.com who called the document, “a plan to make a plan.”

First, the report extols the virtues of the internet, “For many Americans broadband Internet access has transformed the way they live their lives…” and then highlights the government’s place in making it possible, “…Federal agencies [have] cooperated with scientists and universities, first to seed the Internet and later to grow its first backbone.” These trips down memory lane routinely omit the fact that until people outside government developed HTML and HTTP, the internet was nothing more than a quaint experiment touching no one outside university faculty.