MADE

The Psychology Of Free…(Or, Why I Won’t Pay For A Song)

One of the biggest misconceptions about pricing is the notion that people base most buying decisions on rational economic calculations. The truth is that they’re based far more on psychology most of the time. There’s several ways to look at this. One is from a value standpoint. Most people would probably rather pay $4.50 for a [...]

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Why The Cost Of Software and Music Trend To Zero

Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources with alternative uses. It sounds like esoteric mumbo jumbo. But all it means is that the world has stuff we want and that we can’t all have that stuff and the market decides how it all gets divvied out. It’s one of the more important [...]

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Digital Disruption Isn’t Unfair

I spent part of last weekend cleaning out my CD collection. By that I mean I threw it in the trash. Some of the albums were somewhat obscure and stuff I’d probably  never find in a store. But I threw them all out for the simple reason that I don’t need them anymore. I can [...]

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Mobile Is The Future Of Marketing

Mobile is the future of communication and collaboration. You know it is because of its meteoric rise all over the world. According to Morgan Stanley, 42% of Americans now own a Smartphone. There’s a prominent venture capitalist by the name of Fred Wilson who wrote a brief post on his blog titled The Golden Triangle. He [...]

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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. [...]

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How MySpace Became Socially Useless

MySpace is dying because at some point, it became socially useless. The site is still an important hub for many bands, but it’s lost the respect of a large portion of the grassroots music community because it really is socially useless. Economist Umair Haque has an interesting article about how social uselessness led to the [...]

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Evidence That MP3 Piratry Is Good For The Music Industry

I dug up this neat little blog post on Chris Anderson’s blog today. Chris Anderson, if you don’t know him, is the editor of Wired magazine. He’s famous for writing a book several years ago called The Long Tail about how the Internet is devastating the hits-based business model that old-style media companies like record [...]

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