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South Korean Music Retailers Dying
terrymaster69 writes "According to this Reuters feature, 95% of South Korean music retail businesses have failed in the last year. 'While South Korea is not alone in seeing a downturn, the drop has been greatly accentuated and particularly deep because of the country's high-speed Internet access and a youth culture that uses some of the most sophisticated gadgets available.' Is this really a problem or just a natural progression?"
But I think the intriguing part is not the situation in Korea itself as much as the reaction to it in the US.
I just read in Business Week that the US slipped from number three --I'm pretty sure we're talking raw numbers rather than percentages-- to number ten in global broadband rankings. It's not altogether impossible that this decline is going to get worse rather than better in the near term.
And if it doesn't, if something like Wi-Max suddenly turns things around, then it could be even more interesting. Let's hope it's the latter rather than the former. But even then, there would be reprecussions for a rather large number of corporations beyond just music.
And herein lies the rub: they are not. Information does not have the required physical properties to be "private property" nor "labour" (or action) and thus is entirely outside traditional economic considerations. The only type of contract that could be drawn is one obligating one party to maintain information in one of its fundamental states: known or unknown. One could swear secrecy for example. Unfortunately this is entirely impossible to apply to enterntainment because the objective of a broadcaster/distributor is to disseminate information and thus break the secrecy. The consumer cannot be required to work for the music company in guarding the secrecy, even if one ignores the fact that the very medium on which the information is disseminated (air vibrations) is not conducive to secrecy.