Jim Seymour R.I.P.

Jim Seymour died suddenly, after a short illness yesterday. He was one of the early cadre of computer columnists, first at the trade rag PC Week, then at the mass-market bi-monthly PC Magazine.

Jim always had a smart, no-nonsense attitude that cut through most of the crap. And he made it fun to read his columns. And he was around for the "information citadel" period of computerdom. This was before hardware homogenization and PC ubiquity, when PCs were for businesses or enthusiasts. You dialed your modem into BBSes or Compuserve, and you got your tech information weekly when the latest PCWeek, MacWeek, or InfoWorld appeared in your mailbox. And if his tech writing weren't enough, four years ago, he started writing a regular column for thestreet.com. There he proved he had a deep understanding of business as well as technology. Here's a column he wrote on 9/11/2000 on downloadable music:

A note to Warner and to the other four of the Big Five: Guys, it isn't going to work.

As I've written here often, the pricing and the copy-protection glued onto these downloadable files (the music industry likes to call that DRM, for Digital Rights Management), are both deal killers. Indeed, each meets the "necessary and sufficient" test beloved by logicians: Either flaw, alone, would be enough to sink the downloadable-music ship. Together, they just do the job faster.

It's so clear that the only thing that will work on a continuing basis is going to be a subscription system -- and not just a one-label, or label-by-label, subscription system. Offer consumers a $10 per month flat-rate download-pretty-much-everything-ever-recorded deal, and you've got a winner. Maybe you can even stretch that to $20 a month, with a steep discount for signing up for a year. But I'm skeptical.

Can anyone make money on a $10 per month charge? If not, the music business is in even more trouble than we know, because that's likely to be the threshold of pain for "music consumers."

We'll miss you Jim. Thanks for all the insights, aha-moments, and your consistent high quality writing. When I saw Jim's byline on a story, I read it.

I'll be praying for his wife and son.

Other links:

• Jim Seymour remembers 15 years of PC Magazine

  

Friedman: Chicken a l'Iraq

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