Don’t ‘iTune’ Us

Mr. Lyons seems to be very unhappy with this whole Internet thing. In another post he challenges websites to start charging for their content, that free can't be a business model. Here we have someone essentially doing that and he complains that the writers should get more that 30%. Perhaps he would be kind enough to tell us what exactly he does think is a good idea?

And by the way, is Mr. Lyons paid more than 30% of the cover price of Newsweek?

Generally speaking, the geeks are not, in fact, "winning" in the way Lyons suggests. Very few geeks have the business acumen to accomplish that. In fact, it's almost certain that the real winners are the financial sharks, er, venture capitalists who put up the money for the geeks to create their technological sand castles. In return for risking their capital, the venture capitalists claim the lion's share of profits that may be made. The geek(s) coming up with the ideas in the first place typically fare decently, but not obscenely well, if the idea takes off, and the geeks they hire to actually do the implementation grunt work typically onl;y fare only somewhat better than average... few get wealthy despite the stock options and all. Funny thing, but the money holders got to be money holders because they figured out the angles that tilted the odds in their favor. Those stock options aren't much better than lottery tickets for the typical geek, but only the money barons know that...

QPORIT makes some good points. From the individual artist's standpoint the share Amazon and iTunes provides is actually better than what most publishers and record companies provide artists. But Amazon and iTunes only provide distribution??? necessary but not sufficient. So we come to what is the heart of the challenge facing any independent artist???breakthrough marketing.

Publishers aren't effective when it comes to marketing anything new. They lose money on 90% of the new literary or commercial fiction they publish. If you're a new author, they look to you to provide the marketing plan and the demographics of your audience. Why? Simply because they have no such expertise in house. As things stand, traditional print publishers don't bring enough to the table to be viable on a long-term basis. I think they know this; there's been enough public hand-wringing about the subject lately.

Then, we get to the journalists and critics???most of whom will only write about something if it comes to them through the door from the usual industry and publicist sources, so they mostly end up propping up the same-old-same-old. I'm not saying they're "bad guys," just that they're more often part of what's broken rather than out there looking for what's truly new and notable.

After about two and a half-year's development, we launched http://www.aSiteAboutSomething.com a few weeks ago. In Seth Godin's marketing terminology, it's our "purple cow." Adobe thinks our AIR eReader is unique enough that they created a category just for us on their AIR marketplace. The site itself is a Flash tour de force. We've got a unique technology story, and we plan to push it as hard as we can. That being said, as an artist, what I really want is for journalists and critics to review the three novels and collection of songs that the site was built to showcase. How easy do you think that will be?

I can't say I feel sorry for any big corporation in all this. Gone are the days when we sat around camp fires to hear music and stories told by the elders. So if you didn't get behind Apple or Amazon, then you simply backed the wrong horse in the media distribution game. However, iTunes did the music lover a huge favor. It brought about the return of the 45RPM.

I don't give a care if Apple gets 30% of my dollar when I buy a song that I like. I no longer have to shell out $15 bucks for an entire CD that is not worth it. When Albums clocked in at 45 minutes it was quality 'content'. Now there are so many CDs bloated will crap to get the album up over an hour. We know someone is making a buck off of us. Who really cares weather it's Apple or Amazon or anyone else in the American Corporate landscape. The little man will never be offered content for free.

I just past up going to baseball game at one of New York's fine new stadiums and bought about 100 of my favorites tunes from the 70's and 80's at the iTunes Atore instead. I'll have them forever.

Les is more. Thank you Mr. Jobs!!

Thought this quote from pontiuspilate (below) deserved to be highlighted again:

About Apple's 70/30, WHAT?! Do you know how much a CD costs? $15, give or take. Do you know how much artists make off of that? $0.09 per sale. Hmm, that looks a little less than 70%, doesn't it? Apple's "tollbooth" is hugely better than most of the other deals musicians (and now iPod/iPhone programmers) get in the physical world. Maybe you should stop mouthpiecing for the "old media barons" and look at the big picture: these bloggers and writers and musicians wouldn't have been glanced at in the old system.

Roger that!

Umm, what? Are you kidding me? I'm starting to think you're not even a tech editor, since you're blaming "techies" for setting prices that are obviously the work of the companies, not the programmers or technicians. The Amazon 30/70 isn't good, but if you sell your blog on the Kindle *and* use AdSense on your own website, you're making money. Amazon also handles the server load for your subscription, so quit complaining.

About Apple's 70/30, WHAT?! Do you know how much a CD costs? $15, give or take. Do you know how much artists make off of that? $0.09 per sale. Hmm, that looks a little less than 70%, doesn't it? Apple's "tollbooth" is hugely better than most of the other deals musicians (and now iPod/iPhone programmers) get in the physical world. Maybe you should stop mouthpiecing for the "old media barons" and look at the big picture: these bloggers and writers and musicians wouldn't have been glanced at in the old system.

I'm re-reading your comment about the guys in Silicon Valley pocketing all the dough and I *still* can't believe it. How did you go from "Amazon is enforcing a relatively unfair system" to "THE GEEKS ARE OUT TO GET US WRITERS!!!1one"? It's not that hard to make an online store if you have the money. A lot less money than if you actually started your own physical store. You make it seem like there's this big wall separating the elite programming society from the lowly writers and musicians. Get over yourself.

I'm glad to read an article (if tantalisingly brief) addressing this issue -- the aggregators take home all the cash, leaving the content creators as penniless as ever. The Long Tail never did look good for content creators, and that was devised as taking a cumulative nominal amount from each creator, never mind 70%! Why don't the big labels create their own stores? It's too late -- a monumental amount of momentum would be required to shift these companies from their software and hardware monopolies. Not to mention this is where the majority of music/ebooks get bought -- don't join in and you'll be left out completely, unable to build the sales foundation you need to kick-start your own store (and with iPods used, why would anyone switch?).

Amazon's deal looks extortionate, but at least they're honest about the split. The other revenue source for independent writers and small publishers is Google AdSense. There, Google keeps the split and even the price secret, and arbitrarily changes both without even notifying you.

Hey, the Amazon deal is starting to look good -- by comparison to Google.

Any market where almost all the profit goes to the distributors (think Enron with energy), is inherently rigged and ultimately destructive for both the resource-provider and the customers.

I really don't understand why the music labels don't just create their own online store (like itunes) and let their deals with Apple expire...even just having a credible demo should be enough to scare the crap out of itunes and force a better deal.

Good point. Pity this same point is not discussed more often. People like Lessig are getting all the airing. Lessig always forgets the economic side of things. It is as if only big companies like Sony were the bad guys, living on someone else???s work, whereas Google, Sun and other big sharks had in mind to give us freebies for nothing. These freebies are in fact hurting us all, making the dream of a better digital world come to an end, as Lyons points out. After all this technology, we are back to where we came from, only this time there is much more pretense. Instead of Creative Commons, what we need is public campaigns to persuade people to pay creators as directly as possible, instead of reading our books, listening to our music and using our software for free.

Boo-hoo, boo-hoo! Whaaa, whaaa, whaaaaa!