It's Time Again For "Screw the RIAA"

My favourite game. Or one of them, at least.

Harvey Danger has released it's first album in five years, and they're giving it away for free over the Internet. Woo-hoo.

The album itself is pretty good (to my ears, at any rate) and I'd reccomend giving it a try. Risk-free, after all. That said, there's a wrinkle to all media industries that we don't often think of - time. How much media people consume is basically a static pie at this point. Unlike with something like food or cars, the market for media (broadly speaking) is essentially saturated, in that there is no significant amounts of time in the western world that aren't a) free (as in non-work or sleep) and b) not already used consuming television, radio, etc.

The implications for this are really important. Every second you spend listening to music that the RIAA isn't collecting a nickel for, you're undermining their basic business model.

There's a second pie to consider in the media business, and that's personal expenditures. Given the massive proliferation of media technologies in the last thirty years or so, you'd think that we'd have spent a commensurately larger share of our income on new media. Except this hasn't happened, or at least not to the degree you might think. Individual spending on media has grown very little, if at all. Where there's been an enormous increase in spending is in business and government. Easily 80% of spending on new technology comes from these two groups, and not from individuals.

This is referred to the "law of constant proportional media expenditures".

So we've got one pie which is static - time. And another pie that grows slowly, if at all - money. By listening to free (legal) music, you're attacking the media industry at both ends. Keep it up! Put the Vivendis and Viacoms of the world out of business.

Interestingly, one of my papers this term is going to be on how Apple Computer is reshaping the media industry. One of the interesting things to note: Apple now makes more money from it's iPods and the iTunes music store than it does from any single line of its computers. (Overall computers still make up about 4-5 times as much revenue as iPods.) Meanwhile, iPod's revenue growth (from last year) is 280%, and the "other music products" section (which contains iTunes) has increased by over 600%.

In another few years, it's possible that Apple will go from being a computer store that sells music, to a music store that used to sell computers.