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| Friday, April 5, 2002 |
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Exactly 
| | I'm sick and tired of these discussion board pukes hiding behind the veil of community as they trash someone with enough balls to be a public figure. |
What's the value of a relationship? Or vice versa?
| | In the front-loaded economy, there is a case for consumers to expect goods and services for free. Consumers--who think that they should be able to swap songs for free, use pirated software, or obtain medicines at a competitive price without paying a markup to patent holders--are not entirely wrong. The most efficient allocation of goods and services is obtained when the price is equal to marginal cost--and if the marginal cost is zero, so be it. |
| | This addresses threats to the existing intellectual property distribution system by suggesting some constructive new solutions. Which is fine. But it's also econo-jive (to me, at least). And I think the answer can't come just from the supply side, or from government. It has to come from respect for the powers of real customers in real market relationships. So forgive me for going into a perhaps unrelated rant: |
| | I am not a fucking consumer. I am a paying customer. I have bought thousands of dollars worth of music and other recorded goods over many years, and would gladly continue to do that, if there were a real marketplace that allowed it. The Net creates a necessary but insufficient founding condition for that marketplace. And the entertainment industry wants to fuck that up because they see real market relationships as a threat to the old unbalanced producer/consumer power advantage (which isn't a relationship at all) that they've enjoyed since the Harding Administration. |
| | I mean "real marketplace" literally: a bazaar. Not a category, a demographic, a region any of the other nouns for which "market" provides a handy but misleading synonym. |
| | In a real bazaar, the supply side doesn't set all the conditions by which demand may behave. That's what we've had for roughly the entire history of the entertainment industry. That industry's incumbent supply side wants those conditions to persist, even though their advantages have been diminished by the bazaar-supporting commons that the Internet creates. So, instead of welcoming these new conditions in an opportunistic way, this ossified old industry wants their departed power advantages restored by force of law. Well, excuse me: fuck that. |
| | Let's look at what the demand side of this market would want if the means were there for creating and sustaining the customer-vendor relationships that make markets what they are. |
| | Let's imagine being able to engage the first sources of music and other forms of entertainment on a direct, a la carte basis. Imagine paying for everything you listen to on the radio on the same basis, knowing that most of what you were paying for went back to the originators of those musical selections and those programs, with a fair handling fee for the intermediaries. Imagine what happens when the means are in place for passive consumers to become active customers. |
| | That's what we need to create. The Net is just the beginning. Now we have to build out the rest of it. If the entertainment hegemonizers can't take the lead in this thing, they need to follow or get out of the fucking way. |
Ground zero for a you-heard-it-here-first
| | I listened tonight to a demo CD of Venice Cameron, a singer from Toronto who happens to be the daughter of my hosts here in Seattle. This wasn't one of those "listen to my kid" moments (though technically, I suppose it was). Venice's parents are brilliant folks and serious artists in their own rights, among other things. Anyway, I had no idea. She's almost unbelievably good. I was completely blown away. Her songs are terrific, and her singing is by turns soulful, playful, acrobatic and wise — with an operatic vocal range . And she's just twenty-one or something. |
| | I just looked her up on Google and found this page that the producer John Jones put up (as a blog, I guess) a couple months ago. He's done Duran Duran, Celine Dion, Fleetwood Mac... No wonder it's so beautifully done. |
| | So keep your ears piqued. |
Just in time to miss the Olympics by like, two months or something
| | Jerry Kindall, another local up here in Seattle, notes that the new OmniWeb for OS X is out. I've been using the last version for several days now and on the whole I've been liking it. Looking forward to trying the new version on a couple of the sites the old one wouldn't parse. Like Xo's for example. Will he popdown menus work on the page? The Customer Care heading on the index page, for example, has a popdown menu that shows in other browsers but not in OmniWeb. Still: a quibble. |
| | Today I head for Salt Lake City for a weekend of skiing with the family (first time in 6 years). Then work again. |
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