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music industry, headphones, Toby Elwin, blog

Fast Start — What publishing learned from music piracy

Fast Start conversation: A 3-year decline in sales from $14.5 billion to $2 billion found the music industry band together to assault technology. The coordinated move drives the consumer to a coordinated solution: the black market and music piracy. The publishing industry tries something different as this Wall Street Journal article What To Do When Attacked by Pirates. The music industry and the publishing industry stand in contrast. The death of the music industry continues to reveal a decades-long crime scene that is another story and earlier blog. Are you there for your early adopters or does your company strategy look at digital as the devil, as the music industry feels? In contrast, is technology an enabler in your strategy in the way the publishing industry chose and you build plans to delight consumers?

Media’s two tribes — charging for content

The lines are drawn: charge for content, give content for free. In Media’s two tribes The Economist breaks down the thought of charging for premium content over giving content away. In this article from The Economist, read about what 2 UK media outlets weigh in their chosen strategy as well a look at some of the film industry’s battles for a business model. It just might be for the survival of the media industry itself, from Netflix, Hulu, Disney, and Apple. There are also strategies in-between, as The Atlantic points out in Closing the Digital Frontier: But now, it seems, things are changing all over again. The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to …

A View: Tablet PCs Must Get Cheaper, Lighter, More Connected

In the latest issue of Wired magazine Steven Levy’s article Tablet PCs Must Get Cheaper, Lighter, More Connected is a good over view of what it might take to push the tablet into a new category of computing. Some quick hits: Tablets must be cheap enough to lose ~$149 [or cheap enough when you drop it/spill coffee/spill beer on it you don’t have an emotional breakdown on a replacement cost] Tablets must be light as paper Tablets must always be connected I’ve held back on the craze. I actually don’t want a tablet that does what my laptop, smart phone, or desktop does. I prefer a tablet exclusively for reading as I find little enough time or uninterrupted reading and prefer to sit without “you’ve got mail” popping up and interrupting my attempt, at last, to read War and Peace. I look …