And the thing is, this applies not just to music, but other forms of art as well. Take visual art. How can someone who makes digital imagery (stills, or animations, movies...) make a living by doing "live performances"? What about software developers? These are all really special cases of the same thing: digital media.
In the case of those performing visual art, the "live performances" would be exhibitions, demonstrations, social gatherings, etc. The revenues would be derived from entrance fees.
Of course, I don't see that as being a serious and steady form of income, but I do see another revenue stream that could be milked - merchandising. All the tshirts, the calendars, the posters, the coffee mugs, etc. There is a steady stream of potential revenue there.
I think we're moving away from the "charge for content" society that is so popular with Corporate America, and I'm seeing the beginnings of a more open "give the content away" attitude.
A very simple revenue scheme using advertising could be arranged - the MP3 is available for free on a download page, which contains some form of advertising. The more popular the song, the more hits the download page receives, and the more money the advertisers will pay out to the artists. If the files are available from a central point of contact, the number of people willing to hunt and search will narrow down to those who are searching for an older tune. Combine the aforementioned merchandising idea on the same page, and I believe this revenue stream will be enough to support the band, as well as letting the public (and not the corporate hype machine) determine who are the most popular (and most well-paid) bands.
This makes sense, of course. Looking at the patents, very clearly Transmeta has prototyped (duh) a design utilizing hardware _and_ software optimizations. However, the patent(s) don't appear to have that "let's rev these babies up as high as they'll go" attitude. Transmeta appears to be focused more on quality through optimization (and perhaps stability, but that remains to be seen). And mobile computing is an arena that language-independent optimizations would kick some serious ass.
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And the thing is, this applies not just to music, but other forms of art as well. Take visual art. How can someone who makes digital imagery (stills, or animations, movies...) make a living by doing "live performances"? What about software developers? These are all really special cases of the same thing: digital media.
In the case of those performing visual art, the "live performances" would be exhibitions, demonstrations, social gatherings, etc. The revenues would be derived from entrance fees.
Of course, I don't see that as being a serious and steady form of income, but I do see another revenue stream that could be milked - merchandising. All the tshirts, the calendars, the posters, the coffee mugs, etc. There is a steady stream of potential revenue there.
I think we're moving away from the "charge for content" society that is so popular with Corporate America, and I'm seeing the beginnings of a more open "give the content away" attitude.
A very simple revenue scheme using advertising could be arranged - the MP3 is available for free on a download page, which contains some form of advertising. The more popular the song, the more hits the download page receives, and the more money the advertisers will pay out to the artists. If the files are available from a central point of contact, the number of people willing to hunt and search will narrow down to those who are searching for an older tune. Combine the aforementioned merchandising idea on the same page, and I believe this revenue stream will be enough to support the band, as well as letting the public (and not the corporate hype machine) determine who are the most popular (and most well-paid) bands.
I've decided that the best part about this Jan 1st being gone is that this means there are only 18 days left for the Transmeta announcement...
This makes sense, of course. Looking at the patents, very clearly Transmeta has prototyped (duh) a design utilizing hardware _and_ software optimizations. However, the patent(s) don't appear to have that "let's rev these babies up as high as they'll go" attitude. Transmeta appears to be focused more on quality through optimization (and perhaps stability, but that remains to be seen). And mobile computing is an arena that language-independent optimizations would kick some serious ass.