A very simple question
So, there is the NinjaVideo Case, the point being that some people made several hundred thousand dollars with a platform which is for sharing content.
At least this includes a very important point which was mostly absent over the war against filesharers in the past decade: somebody is somehow making money with content he didn’t create and doesn’t have the rights to.
It is a whole other thing to share culture and information.
More importantly, you have no right to withhold technological solutions from me, just because you are not quick enough to adopt your business model to technological evolution.
The job of any entrepreneur is to construct a use case and a business case that allow them to make money, given the current constraints of society and technology.
(from the wonderfully entitled “I Don’t Care About Your Profits, And It Enrages Me That You Think I Should”)
Since this is a music blog, here’s a spin on music: if your priority is not if I listen to your music, but if I paid to listen to your music, you are not an artist. It’s not like there is a lack of bands, artists or “FREE DOWNLOAD!!!”s to chose from. Also, your attitude puts your body of work in question and I couldn’t care less about you and your “music” (you probably call it a “product” :)
So that whole thing was never about the musicians. It is about copyright holders. Labels and their owning cooperations. They reap what they sew: they industrialized art and built their business model on controlling distribution. Now that control got lost. Ugh, shit. Turns out that the use case got lost with that and down the drain goes the business case. See ya.
But what did “the Indies” do (if that broad generalization is allowed for one paragraph)? Those who saw being independent as an asset and acted on it, evolved. They found use and business cases in the new paradigm - not to speak of actually contributing something of cultural relevance besides making sales and doing “all that hard promotion work” (by which I don’t want to disrespect the work or that it’s hard, but… everyone’s job is hard, pal).
Others are still unable to adapt to a whole decade of experience. They analyze, and analyze, and analyze and wish the control came back. They don’t see the necessity to invest in experiments because they didn’t have to do so for decades. They seek to impress those who care about music with potential numbers of potential lost sales. They loose some of their most important artists to a growing DIY and self-publishing movement while repeating over and over how important their role to culture and “the scene” is. Well, guess what, your role is not as important as it used to be. Evolve, invent, contribute. Or… don’t. See ya. It’s not like there is a lack of people trying to sell me stuff.
If Napster was the birth of a new age of distribution (and I am not alone in thinking so), my two major points here are:
- As long as I do not commercially exploit it, it is my damn right as a human being to exchange culture and information with anybody I want and via all the technology available - and don’t get in my way doing so, you might regret it later!
- If you still mourn your losses, this crisp comment to a Techdirt-post on the NinjaVideo-thing asks the very simple question you should ask yourself now (as you should have 12 years ago):
how is it that content creators can’t make money off of their content if pirates are making money off of the content? Maybe the content creators should be looking at how the pirates are doing it?
And now I’ll get my Bitorrent-client running and download some legally distributed content…
see you,
filtercake :)
