Why I am Optimistic About the Music Industry

re: Why I am Optimistic About the Music Industry

lokidd — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 07:16:28 GMT

<i> Second, digital technology has cut to near zero the costs of duplication and distribution (although also the cost of piracy)</i>

Brings us to the question why do artists then need labels to distribute their music? Has Prince not broken the format?

At one I point thought, the labels might have a chance with upcomers (think Idol, Dance with the stars). But then youtube has given some of these upcomers (check out cherry chocolate rain) the ability to hit crit mass.

Sorry to disagree, but I don't think the labels have a good idea on how to move. The clear winners in our ever digital world are the likes of Apple & Google.

re: Why I am Optimistic About the Music Industry

Falguni — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 08:21:04 GMT

Hi Tom,

First of all, I'm glad to see that the future CEO of our proposed Thomson Reuters merger is a blogger. I work at Thomson Financial.

I've been following your blog and the digital music economy raises a question about the future of financial and business information, and arguably all media. How will this content be consumed as a future generations of web savvy financial professionals become more choosy and demand personalization in what they want to see and pay for and what they don't? The proliferation of widgets and personalized homepages such as iGoogle and Netvibes has created a long tail of content choices. Similar to being able to download only the song you want (and not having to buy the whole album) what are your thoughts on just providing a single financial data set or news feed via widgets to a personalized homepage for set fees, rather than packaged data solutions and terminals? I know Reuters already has some news widgets available for free but will the professional financial data market go the way of digital music?

Thanks

re: Why I am Optimistic About the Music Industry

Tom Glocer — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:35:27 GMT

I do believe in personalization or at least mass customization of digital content. The technology is already in place to do this, and Reuters follows a commercial policy that offers our customers the option of buying only components (whether content or applications) rather than an integrated terminal offering.

I believe that the way that Thomson-Reuters will avoid commoditization and the "race to free" in consumer content is to continue each firm's focus on indispensible content for professionals delivered in the formats and at exactly the right point in their daily workflow they need to do their jobs

re: Why I am Optimistic About the Music Industry

jlengeli — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:50:00 GMT

Hi Tom:

I came across this blog entry http://www.npr.org/blogs/monitormix/ on npr.org yesterday that I thought you may find interesting. The author is the former lead guitarist of Sleater-Kinney, now blogging for NPR. The April 3, 2008 entry, "BRANDED," is her perspective on your above musing.

Best,

Jennifer