Getting It: In A World Of Digital Abundance, Sell The Scarcities

A recurrent refrain from the copyright industries is that you can't make money from digital goods if they are freely available online. To which Techdirt has been pointing out for years that not only are there many ways of doing precisely that, but lots of people are already coining it as a result. One of the Guardian's columnists has noticed one of them - that in a world of digital abundance, you can make money by selling associated scarcities: 

On Techdirt.

Cielo!

Or rather, Madonna! - another one:

Pop star Madonna is close to leaving her long-time Warner Bros. Records label for a wide-ranging $US120 million (A$134 million) deal with concert promotion firm Live Nation, a source familiar with the talks said on Wednesday.

The story was first reported on the Wall Street Journal's website, which said Madonna would receive a mix of cash and stock in exchange for allowing Live Nation to distribute three studio albums, promote concert tours, sell merchandise and license her name.

Such a deal is virtually unprecedented, but may become more common as struggling record labels and other players in the music industry seek to shore up revenues by going into business with musical acts, rather than just taking fees for selling their albums or concert tickets.

OK, so no mention of music being given away, but the other key elements are there: concert tours, merchandise and licensing. Bye-bye music industry. (Via TechCrunch.)

Full of Sound and Fury

I didn't comment on this piece from TechCrunch entitled "The inevitable march of recorded music towards free" since it largely recapitulates stuff that I've been wittering on about for ages (although it's good to see an A-lister joining the choir).

However, what is really interesting is the level of, er, wrong-headedness exhibited in the comments - about how copying digital files is "stealing" (infringement of an intellectual monopoly, actually), about how musicians never create without concrete financial incentives (oh yeah? Ask Schubert), how no one could make enough money from touring to make up for loss of income from CDs (apart from these musicians, that is) etc. etc.

If the readers of TechCrunch can be so ill informed, maybe this is going to take a little longer than I thought (or maybe TechCrunch readers are dafter than I thought....)

Music to My Ears

There's a fascinating story over on BBC News, nominally about Madonna, but really about a new commons. It reports on how concerts are becoming ever-more important to rock stars, as sales of their recordings diminish.

The latter fact may be due to the Internet; but whether it is or not, the future seems to be one where the digital stuff - the song - is essentially free, and the stars make their dosh from the analogue side - concerts. So here we have pop songs as a new commons, where the creators of that commons make a more than decent living.

Two quotations in particular are worth noting. One is from Alan Krueger, an economist, who provides the figures to back up this idea:

Only four of the top 35 income-earners made more money from recordings than live concerts. For the top 35 artists as a whole, income from touring exceeded income from record sales by a ratio of 7.5 to one in 2002.

The other is from the ever-perceptive David Bowie:

music itself is going to become like running water or electricity

Now that's music to my ears.