An audience of two

Wednesday March 22, 2006

An end to music piracy
I was reading an article on software and music piracy in Canada. It's a nice piece that effectively condenses every argument I've ever made on the subject. Coincidentally I also found an article on Wikipedia about the Long Tail. Basically, you can make just as much money by selling a million different songs than you can by selling the same song a million times. Even more in fact; because in order to sell that same song a million times you'll inevitably have to spend a lot of money advertising and promoting it.

The problem is that the music industry is still obsessed with the left hand side of the sales graph. A single iPod could contain the entire playlists of your typical American radio stations. The industry spends millions trying to create the next Coldplay or Madonna, but there's potentially a larger amount of money to be made simply by selling - cheaply - the songs that a million artists are recording in their bedrooms and garages.

You no longer need a fancy storefront and big advertising. Here at Sun, Paul Lamere is working on a project called Search Inside The Music that aims to quantify similarities in music. Forget Amazon's often ridiculed "People who bought this also bought" section that frequently made highly inappropriate recommendations, this is a concept that will allow you to find completely new artists who would otherwise have remained anonymous in the world of Sony, Clear Channel and Tower Records.

And then hopefully buy them for 10c a song. Permalink | | | | Comments [0]
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