Some of you have asked for a copy of my recent presentation at WordCamp Cape Town. The organisers have loaded all of the sessions onto YouTube, so if you would like to watch my session (or any of the others, look below).
If you are at all interested in WordPress and missed WordCamp , I highly recommend that you look out for WordCamp Cape Town 2012, it is going to be a fantastic conference.
Here is the YouTube video.
And here are the slides
A wall at Planet Hollywood, Times Square. It contains a couple of hundred Gibson Guitars, mostly the Les Paul.
This is a fitting memorial to the famous Les Paul, who died on August 13 2009. He created the Gibson Les Paul guitar, which was played by almost every rock band in the world.
He also invented multi-track recording, which of course revolutionised the music industry.
Currently, every 10 year old kid with a computer and iPod is downloading and sharing unlicensed (i.e., illegal) music.
Because it is so easy to download and share music, the music industry is understandably concerned about lost revenue, and everybody with a single illegally obtained MP3 (i.e.,: most of us) is technically a criminal. This is clearly a loose-loose situation.
So, how can we turn it into a win-win situation. The only way that I can see involves two key points:
Here are two suggestions.
Free Music
How about getting the music industry to partner with some of the large social networking sites such as FaceBook or MySpace? Make the MP3’s available at no cost on these sites, but share the advertising revenue that is generated between the music and the websites.
The free MP3’s will drive huge traffic to the sites, and they will allow for highly-profiled advertising to be served to the users (aside from existing profile info they already have).
So, the users are happy- they are getting free music, the music industry is happy – they are getting (advertising) revenue due to the online music, and on top of it the websites are getting revenue due to the additional traffic.
Really Cheap Music
The second suggestion is to pay a monthly subscription for your music. So for example, you pay $29.99 per month, which gives you access to whatever music you wish to listen to. So, you are not actually paying for the music, you are paying for the right to listen to it.
This is similar to a mobile phone contract, in which you are paying for the right to make a telephone call, regardless of if you make any calls or not. You could possibly extend this analogy and say that you pay 10c for each song you listen to – equivalent to paying for each phone call that you actually make.
Whatever option happens, I am convinced that the “goto a retail store and buy a CD” model is on the way out.
Notes
The Global Advertising spend was worth $358 billion in 2004.
The global music industry spend was $12,4 billion in 2005.
A few weeks ago, in a momentary lack of my intelligence, Lois’ iPod shuffle (or iShuffle as we call it) went through our washing machine (I had left it in my pocket). I realised that it was there about five minutes after switching it on.
Now, as most of you are aware, you cannot open the door of most washing machines once they have started washing. So with much trepidation I patiently waited for the washing to end.
Once the washing was complete, I took the iPod out (it was now sparkling white), and dried it a bit with a warm hair-dryer. (Because it was an iPod I could not take out the battery). After leaving it overnight, it worked fine with no problems whatsoever. I was astounded.
Aside from the fact that it is washing-machine proof, it really is an amazing little mp3 player. It is small, light, has excellent sound quality, a good battery, and it holds about 250 songs. I love it!
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