News and views from a software developer's perspective
Thursday, June 06, 2002Facing the Music
Rock stars and music-industry execs once ruled the earth, but now -- in terms of size and profit margins -- the music industry is becoming the book business (minus the literacy).
I just finished reading this fascinating article. Is the music industry doomed to become a low-margin, boring business? Maybe it will. Maybe rock and roll is just too worn out.
In my vision of the future of the music industry, the successful music companies make money by producing a huge volume of music and selling it cheaply to consumers. There's no need to spend millions promoting a promising artist. Just throw his music up on your web site so your subscribers can download it. Consumers do have an insatiable appetite for music, but they also get bored quickly. They are always looking for new music. Soon the music companies will catch on to that and give them what they want.
My own personal, short review of Mozilla 1.0: The mail client is unacceptable because it will always download the images in an HTML mail. In my opinion, that is an unacceptable violation of privacy, since many email marketing companies embed images in their messages to track whether or not users are viewing them. (If the image is downloaded, they assume the message was viewed.) The solution is to allow the user to disable downloading of images, or to allow the user to disable HTML mail altogether.
Having said that, though, I will also say that the Mozilla web browser rocks!
The mozilla.org web server seems to be carrying a heavy load today. I guess I'll wait a few days before I download Mozilla 1.0, which was officially released yesterday.
And congratulations to all the Mozilla developers!
For all the talk of copy protection, why don't consumers have copy protection over their personal information. How about this: a do-not-copy flag that consumers can set on their email address, phone number, etc. It kinda turns the tables, doesn't it? :-)