Mediacology

Is Content Still A Business? » Publishing 2.0:

It seems in recent years that as the music industry goes, so goes the rest of the media industry. Is there reason to believe that other forms of content will suffer the same fate as music? There’s one critical commonality to what the Internet and digitization has done to all content that would support this theory: disaggregation

All the focus on the digitization and online distribution of music — and now video — has been on piracy. But what if that’s just a red herring?

You could argue that the most striking consequence of digitizing media and distributing it online is that all content is now available in a discrete, granual form. Music file. Article page. Video clip. Podcast. Photo. There are very few places on the web that require you to buy a whole package in order to get one item.

This is a radical transformation of the content business. Think about it.

As the creative producers of content we artists and makers already know what it’s like to never get paid. So I cry crocodile tears when I read that corporations can’t sell what they have been stealing for years (think about Disney visa-vi brothers Grim). Moreover, content has come to mean many things. I remember about ten years ago the standard freelance journalism contracts started to identify writers as “content providers.” That meant that publications could resell or reuse the work of the author endlessly through various back channels on the Web without compensation. These days it’s hard to tell how money is made with the way in which news proliferates through syndication. Essentially writers became “work-for-hire” and the idea of intellectual property, held in such high esteem with corporations, is not a matter of real estate, but a channel of flow.

So the idea now is that people will make money from performance and “merch”- t-shirts, buttons, and who know what. Great for musicians, but refrigerator magnets for the next Picasso? Fridge poems for the Vonneguts of the world? For me “performance” comes in the form of teaching and giving talks. I like it that way. I find the live setting much more engaging and invigorating than blasting info bits into the datasphere. What do you think?