A new day dawning for digital media?
Lots of interesting press in recent weeks and months in the digital media distribution arena:
- Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Oasis and others break away from major labels last fall to bring their music direct to fans, and Madonna helps concert promoter Live Nation transform itself into a record company as she ditches Warner Music
- Amazon adds Sony BMG’s catalog to its online music store, which makes it the only source for play-on-any-device, DRM-free files from all four major labels (and which clearly signals that the majors want to free themselves and consumers from Apple’s captivity)
- BitTorrent partners with Netgear and D-Link to optimize their routers and other network appliances for use with BitTorrent. We’ll eventually see BitTorrent code and code from similar systems resident on nodes throughout the Net (think BitTorrent on Cisco). As these intelligent and bandwidth efficient systems evolve beyond PCs to encompass routers and other network hardware to which humans don’t directly relate, we’ll have the infrastructure for fast, Internet-based distribution of songs, video and other content to and among TVs, stereos and other resources that most of us don’t think of as being an intergral part of the Net today. The Netgear and D-Link partnerships follow on the heels of others BitTorrent has struck with major movie studios and record labels
The pace of shifts in business models in response to new technologies finally seems to be accelerating. The labels and studios are beginning to transition from “circle the wagons” mode to “embrace and extend” mode — more out of necessity than foresight, to be sure, but it’s happening. What remains to be seen is who will be standing when the dust settles.
(Yes, this post is evidence of a New Year’s resolution. When this busy lawyer and relatively new parent, who likes to get to the gym once in a while, decided to start blogging, friends who’d gone before me said, “Good luck.” My 2007 moved at warp speed, and this blog was one of its casualties. My 2008 promises to be (good) crazy, too, but a few skipped workouts seems like a small price to pay for the pleasure of online self-expression.)
January 29th 2008, 10:41pm