Slashdot Mirror
Cory Doctorow Calls Death To Music, Movies, Print
An anonymous reader writes "Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow depicts an unfortunate near-future for a handful of media industries being transformed or killed by the Internet. Predicting a large-scale transformation of the music, movie, book, and newspaper industry, Doctorow says, 'The Internet chews up media and spits them out again. Sometimes they get more robust. Sometimes they get more profitable. Sometimes they die.' While the Internet has the potential to help the dying book industry, for example, Doctorow predicts the 'imminent collapse' of the American newspaper industry because advertisers are uninterested in spending money on the remaining offline readership, such as senior citizens, who prove less valuable."
Oh, and to address the dodge of "cheap enough"--in modern media, there is a definite correlation between quality and expenditure. For electronic music, for example (because I do some electronica), the software is expensive and there are no decent open source equivalents for most of the lineups of any of the major companies. Rosegarden is pretty good, but it doesn't address, say, Propellerheads Reason or even most of the functionality of Ableton Live (the tool I'd say it's closest to). And there are very few VSTs or other similar tools available for free.
So if you want it "cheap enough," it's not going to be "good enough" for people to buy, and, uh, you just killed quality media.
There is likely a business model that works, but it's not "bottom out the prices and hope more than one person buys it before it hits the torrents".
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."