Thou shall not share

August 31st, 2009

My good friend Gerd Leonhard, has published a great post on the UK’s desire to disconnect those that illegally fileshare. As companies struggle to shore up the thinning value of their analogue business models.

Culture lock down. Image Richard Ross

Curiously the Dutch government undertook a study that showed file sharing increased revenues

The Dutch government, in cooperation with the Dutch research institute TNO, has recently conducted a survey into the economic effects of file sharing on the music industry. The results are quite surprising as they’ve concluded that illegally downloading music (which is allowed in Holland) has a positive effect on the music industry. If it would no longer be possible to download music, the sales of CD’s would further decrease. Quite the perspective change, or not?

Whilst, the Isle of Man is considering implementing a plan that allows people to download unlimited music in return for a basic tax to ISP’s of £1.00 per month, in an effort to find a way to solve illegal music piracy. The idea is that this money is collectively redistributed to copyright holders.

Richard Wray writes,

It has finally sunk in that there will not be one single replacement for the ongoing drop in “physical” music sales – in other words, the perpetual decline in CD buying. Instead, a host of new services will help plug the gap alongside sales of individual digital tracks and albums.

Networked economics is different to analogue economics, in the same way that advertising is also different in the networked society. Where and how we place value on ‘things’ is important; how we package, bundle, filter, point to, link to, enable, are all key components to success.

Those that wish to lock down content through aggressive tactics do not get the digital elixiar of commerce, I would have thought studying Cyworld in Korea might have been a good idea for exec’s, in understanding how to make their business work within the context of digital economics. The model is hybrid, networked and connected. It must be about being; life enabling, life simplifying and navigational.

As we wrote in 2005,

Now, the Age of Connectedness and its newly active communities are altering the way all businesses will market, promote and sell their goods and services. The very first cases are emerging simultaneously around the world, and they clearly give an answer to what the marketing industry has expressed for several years already. Traditional methods of business, are increasingly ineffective.

Phillip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster state in their book Blown to Bits that digitalisation is “deconstructing” traditional industries such as home electronics, business, broadcast, retailing and banking, while at the same time creating new commercial opportunities such as Google and eBay, the low cost airline industry, on-line banking. These are trends echoed time and again by experts analysing the individual phenomena such as digital convergence and disruptive technologies.

Straight Line thinking stops here

hierarchy

silos’

brittle business

unsustainable value

culture lock down

market fundamentalism

dogma

creative apartheid

opacity

the war on everything

information distribution control

top down

Milton Friedman

fundamentalist ideologies

trust empty systems

human units of consumption

human units of production

battery farming education

thin value

Specialisation may well have helped build industrial society – but its like grit in the wheel of the networked society writes John Thackara, these wrenching changes put great stress on industrial systems placing them into deep crisis as they struggle to adapt to the networked world.

Bookmarks: