Business is not a war
People aren’t targets
Advantage isn’t competitive
Power isn’t coercion
Markets aren’t for domination
Profit isn’t value
Exploitation isn’t productive
These principles are outlined in a presentation by economist Umair Haque of the Havas Media Lab. You can watch it here. I strongly urge you to set aside some time to listen to the whole thing because it’s [...]
It Pays To Be Nice (and insanely creative) In The New Economy
30. January 2010
Don’t Waste Time Being Mad At People Who Steal Your Music
There were several comments on an article I wrote last week about why file sharing will lead to a better music industry that expressed dismay with the conclusion of the piece.
One guy mentioned that he discovered that some of his tracks were being ripped from legitimate sites and offered up on scam sites; some were [...]
26. January 2010
Why Digital Music Royalties Don’t Make Sense
AOL bought Bebo in 2008 for $850 million. After that happened, British musician Billy Bragg blasted Bebo in a New York Times article for refusing to pay out royalties to all the musicians who uploaded music to the site. According to him, they were just as much investors in Bebo as the people who put [...]
21. January 2010
File Sharing Will Lead To Better Music
There’s a cool paper about file sharing that was written by economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf this past summer. The conclusion of the paper is that file sharing benefits society. One of the pieces of evidence for that is that less restrictive copyright laws have encouraged greater numbers of creative people to create. [...]
18. January 2010
Twitter, Humility And The Secret To A Long Music Career
I was looking at music sales for the week of 1/3/10. Susan Boyle’s “I Dreamed a Dream” was on its sixth week and sold 3, 103, 828 copies. Mega-selling records like this are becoming an anomaly, but I think there’ll continue to be a place for them in our culture because people still like a [...]
11. January 2010
Why Good Music No Longer Equals Success
I was involved with a group of guys several years ago trying to start up a record label. There were four of us. We had world-class production talent and managed to recruit two very talented hip hop and pop artists. All we wanted was to sign a distribution deal with a major label. The quality [...]
9. January 2010
Rolling Stone’s Steve Knopper On The Rise And Fall Of The Music Industry
Steve Knopper is a reporter at Rolling Stone. He published a book this year called Appetite for Self Destruction about the meteoric rise and fall of the music industry.
I’ve posted a link below to a fascinating interview he did with NPR where he gives a grand sweep of the music industry from the advent [...]
4. February 2010
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