Music in Abundance

So "finding a business model" will no more be a problem for musicians in the digital age than it was in the analogue one. I read the book, wrote the post, made the SlideShare, been there, done that, continued to beat the horse long after it was dead. The bottom line being that institutions and approaches will change, but the big picture for the vast majority of musicians will not.

Economics student though I may be, this blog is not really supposed to be just about business models and institutions. It is supposed to be about culture. So what does all this tell us about where music, as an art form, is going?

When you talk about power laws, about a tiny minority making the majority of the money in an industry, it all sounds so stark and unjust. But from your perspective or mine, it need not be so.

To be blunt, I don't really care which musicians are or are not making money. All I care about is how easy it is to get music that I like, and how easy it is to share it with my friends and family.

Moreover, things are not completely dismal for musicians, either. You aren't very likely to make money by playing or writing music, but that's always been the case. The real change is that the cost of the equipment for recording music has plummeted, and the internet has made it possible for people to hear it that otherwise might never have been able to.

In a way I face something similar here at Cloud Culture. Much like music, it has never been easy to make a living by writing. I love to write, however; and even if I don't have an enormous audience, it is far larger than the zero people that would read the unpublished works I would write in an age before digital technology.

Those who love to make music can do so, record it, and share it cheaply and easily. Because so many more people will be putting out music, there will be a lot more music to listen to. Change may not be obvious from the perspective of how many musicians will make real money. But change will be dramatic for those who love the art form. There will be music in abundance, to enjoy and to serve as inspiration for yet more music.

To that end, there's another book that I really ought to get around to reading...

The Challenges of Online Conversation

I am always thinking about how to build a better comments section. I have some more thoughts, but before I attempt to provide any more answers it is important that I lay out what the question is, exactly.

What I'm going to do here is outline what I consider to be the primary challenges that a well designed comments section or forum of any kind will have to address. Feedback on this would be highly appreciated.

1. Crowding Out by Length. A few motivated individuals can destroy a conversation by putting up extremely long responses. This can hide anything anyone else has to say by just taking up much more space.
2. Crowding Out by Volume. This is a double-edged sword; often if people are getting energized by a discussion and responding rapidly back and forth, it can be a good thing. Unfortunately it also erects a high barrier to entry for people who might have been interested in joining the conversation after it began. It also doesn't necessarily have to be done by individuals who are adding much to the conversation; a superficial point goes from frivolous to nuisance when it is replicated over and over again by someone who doesn't know when enough is enough.
3. Adverse Selection. By engaging in insults, personal attacks, and off-topic ramblings, individuals can make negative contributions by driving out the people who are interested in making valuable contributions to the discussion. The result is a kind of Gresham's law for online discussions; bad commentors drive out good commentors.

Overcoming these challenges isn't just a matter of devising the perfect management software; responsibility also rests on the shoulders of moderators and bloggers who run the particular forums and comments sections. However, once the popularity of an online discussion location reaches a certain scale, it is unrealistic to assume that any one blogger or moderator will have the time and patience it takes to run it well. For this reason good management software is necessary to help empower whoever is responsible for the forum or comments section to maintain them to the maximum extent possible.

The Unchanging Future of Music

The Unchanging Future of Music

View more presentations from AdamGurri.

My first SlideShare presentation, and the simplified version of my previous post.

Turning Fame into Fortune

In a world where the definition of the music industry is changing every day, the one constant is that music creates celebrity. There are worse problems than the challenge of turning fame into fortune.

-Chris Anderson, Free, Chapter 14

Recall that human social and economic interactions all conform the the Pareto principle. This is true not just in terms of a minority of blogs receiving the majority of links or a minority of iPhone apps accounting for the majority of downloads, but also in terms of a minority of books published each year accounting for the majority of sales, and a minority of musicians whose work accounts for the majority of music consumption. The rule of thumb is that the minority accounts for 20% and the majority they account for a whopping 80%; but on the internet often 1% accounts for 99%.

Chris Anderson's first book was devoted to the existence of this distribution in media, new and old. It is well documented and uncontroversial.

In The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb said that the worst advice he was ever given was to find a profession that scaled. Music scales; you can replicate a digital song file perfectly an infinite number of times and distribute it globally through the internet. The person who gave Taleb advice saw this as a good thing for a musician's career--the cost of creating the product is nearly nothing, and the potential audiences are enormous!

Taleb knew better. Industries that scale conform to the Pareto principle much more severely than the ones that don't. A dentist may never be able to make as much money as Madonna, but if he works hard and consistently he can make a lot of money over the course of his career. Madonna may make millions, but the average musician couldn't make as much money as a dentist if they devoted themselves to working just as hard or harder at music.

Music creates celebrity. Anderson calls this the "one constant" in the rapidly changing landscape of the music industry. The fact of the matter is that whether or not songs and albums are sold at a price, for free, or pirated for free, it will make no difference whatsoever to the vast majority of musicians because most of them will go largely unnoticed.

The economic reality of digital media and online distribution will push the price of recorded music down and down until we will all be able to get most of it for free, one way or another. For the recording studios, the record labels--for all the institutions that emerged to minimize the costs specific to a world before modern technology--this is terrifying and will demand adaptation to avoid certain extinction. No doubt many companies that are unable to make the change will die.

But at the end of the day there will be very little difference for the musicians themselves. Before digital technology and the internet, most musicians made next to nothing and a few made an enormous amount. After the transition...most will make next to nothing, and a few will make an enormous amount. But wait, I can hear you protesting. You just said that we'll be able to get most of our music for free! How can anyone, even the very popular, make money off of a product they cannot charge a price for?

Chris Anderson put it perfectly: There are worse problems than the challenge of turning fame into fortune. In the 14th chapter of Free, he goes over the very interesting case of China, where piracy rates make the American filesharing scene seem marginal by comparison. There, musicians make their money by doing work that doesn't scale. I was interested to learn that most of the money they get from concerts does not, in fact, come from ticket sales but from sponsors. Nevertheless, they do make money, and a lot of it. The famous ones, anyway.

I have to admit that when I read Free, it mostly felt like a case of been there, done that. After reading my fair share of books focused on new media, there was very little that I hadn't heard before, in some form. But listening to the section on China was when something finally clicked for me. People have been terrified about what the transition to the digital world will mean for the music industry, but in all likelihood nothing will change, in terms of who will be able to make a living from it. There will be a tiny fraction who make a great living, a few who can make a good living, a yet larger group who can make a decent living, and the vast majority will not be able to make much of a living at all.

All the worrying will ultimately be pointless for the actual musicians. Of course, it will be entirely justified for those invested in existing institutions, but nothing can change that. That is the nature of innovation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Sanitizing Your Public Web Presence

For everyone who has ever feared that the drunken college pictures on Facebook would lose them an employment opportunity.

From the TAT Showroom.

Google Announces New Cloud-Based OS

Image from Wikipedia

Google has surprised everyone by announcing a the development of a new operating system based on their browser, Chrome. Called simply Google Chrome OS, it looks like it will be exactly what I have been hoping I would one day be able to put on my netbook:

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

In short, it will basically boot your computer directly to a browser. I am convinced that this is the future of cloud computing; conventional operating systems will no doubt continue to exist, but for those of us who spend the majority of their computer time on the internet they take up unnecessary space.

I'm very excited to see what Google turns out; apparently they will be coming out with netbooks running Chrome OS in the second half of 2010. I'm hoping Chrome OS will be compatible with my Dell Mini 9 so that I can give it a go myself!

Suggested Further Reading:

Google Drops a Nuclear Bomb on Microsoft. It's Made of Chrome. from TechCrunch

The Google OS Becomes a Reality from ReadWriteWeb

Google Chrome: Redifining the Operating System from TechCrunch

Google Releasing Chrome Operating System from Lifehacker

Google's Chrome OS: What it means, why it matters from Ars Technica

FREE Now Available in Digital Foms

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson

Never Thought I'd be able to embed an entire book on my blog! Chris Anderson certainly is something else. You can also download the unabridged audio book, for free!

With my commute, I'm going with the audio book. In fact, were it not for the free audio book, I wouldn't have the time, or find it practical to spend the money, to read it right now. So I'm very glad indeed that he's doing it this way!

Hat tip: The Long Tail, where you can get more details on this release.