Freedom From Choice
2008 August 29
Mashable has a pretty damn interesting article this morning concerning the thinning of the digital music herd. Link
The author is concerned, and rightly so, about the narrowing of choices of “where” to get your digital music downloads. As the herd is thinned, and as the market shrinks, your choices as a consumer are also narrowed. F’rinstance, I’m a huge fan of eMusic. eMusic provides DRM free music from minor labels for a reasonable cost. If for that reason only, I’m smitten and would be upset if they went away. If only say iTunes and Amazon remain in the future they control my music downloads, not I. And that, my friends, is bad.
We should call up the young men in tights to march on the offices of i-tunes and Amanzon. Tha’d show’em.
The loss of brick and mortar music sellers was a bigger deal (Tower Records). While online consolidation can give increasing power, allowing winners to control types of contracts, etc., the internet has such a low overhead to startup. The big guys will always have challengers, so market forces will be more active, forcing big guys to innovate or die. Remember when AOL bought Time/Warner?