Ethan Kaplan, the VP of technology at Warner Bros. Records, just announced a new website for Metallica that makes it look like they’ve finally decided that music plus internet is not necessarily bad. The site looks like it’s trying to build a community of fans by giving them some free stuff, deals on merchandise, and promoting the new album. It’s too bad I’m not still fourteen and eager to buy anything Metallica produced. It’s funny that the crotchety old guys who wanted to kill the entire internet when people first realized they could download music illegally are now near the front of the pack of major (Okay, it’s questionable if Metallica counts as “major” these days, but bear with me) bands embracing a “I can make more money by giving away non-scarce goods to promote the scarce ones” business model.
Tag: failed business model
Hey, look, this isn’t about baseball
Neil Gaiman – my life in green and purple
Because it seems to me that giving away an e-Book with a hardback is an excellent way to grow the e-book world, and something that a publisher could do at little or no cost.
The Orioles won last night, BTW. Anyway, this seems like a pretty awesome idea. A new guy at Harper Collins is considering giving away a free e-book and audiobook copy of a book which you have just purchased. As Neil says, “of course buying the book would give you the audio and the text, not just the object”. This is something of a radical idea compared to what most people are used to, but it could really grow the market for non-paper books. Growing the market for non-paper books is a good thing for authors and publishers (And the manufacturers of e-book readers and MP3 players and a whole mess of other industries who might be prescient enough to hop on the bandwagon) and, most certainly, book readers (or listeners). As I’ve mentioned (And as Techdirt has mentioned roughly 8 billion times), the marginal cost of producing another copy of an e-book or audiobook in digital format is nothing. Therefore, the cost of these goods should go to zero, as well. This makes them terrible things to try to sell, but wonderful things to use as promotional goods or just as “Hey, we (unlike you, recording industry) really do like our customers” rewards. I have some ulterior motives here – I’m hoping that the e-book market grows until someone puts out a cool e-book reader for a reasonable cost. I currently have 26 free and legal e-books saved on my computer. I’ve only read one of them, because reading a book on a computer screen really sucks. But I’d like to read the rest of them.
Yay, Nashville!
I wrote about this a little while ago, and now Boing Boing says, Copyfighters beat down Tennessee bill. Well done, Tennessee. People in the comments point out that this is not a total victory – it still requires universities to police their students, which is a dumb idea. But at least it’s no longer a horrible, despicable idea.
I hope my friends in Nashville are involved here
Nashville copyright craziness — success! Rematch on Mar 5 – Boing Boing
Yesterday’s rally in Nashville to stop a new copyright bill that would put the expense of policing the movie industry’s business model onto universities was a success — the bill has been stalled and won’t be reconsidered for ten days.
I have two friends down in Nashville (Well, just outside of Nashville, but close enough). One of them probably knows about this already. In fact, I was sort of expecting a post on the subject. I won’t elaborate on all the reasons why laws like this are absurd – BoingBoing does it pretty regularly, and I don’t really have anything to add. But if you’re in or around Nashville, especially if you are or soon will be a student at a Tennessee college, this matters to you. Don’t let them raise your tuition to support the lazy recording industry that stubbornly refuses to embrace the new business available to them through the internet.