virtualeconomics

Happy birthday to you

Copyright law is, of course, an ass - intended to incentivise and protect the creation of new ideas, it now merely disincentivises the creation of new ideas by protecting the old ones.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the distortion of the cultural record of the early C21st fostered by the copyright to "happy birthday". In real life, birthdays are accompanied by the singing of happy birthday. In film, they are not - the rights are expensive so other songs are substituted.

Does this distortion of the cultural record achieve anything? Of course not. No one makes any money from it. It just taunts future historians with the claim that no-one ever sang "happy birthday". But they did. We do. I was there.

Optimise what?

The web is shrinking, says Ben Elowitz. Strip out the growth of Facebook and the rest of the web, the "searchable web", shrank by 9% in the 12 months to March 2011.

This is game-changing for publishers, possibly the emergence of a whole new strategy cycle. If all you're doing is optimising pages of content for Google, well...

(1) you're part of a zero-sum game in which every publisher in your category uses the same publicly-available data to chase the same audience as they search on the same keywords;

(2) the stuff you write for Google isn't all that appealing to people so you'll get them through the door and watch them bounce out after they've seen one page; and

(3) that pie you're fighting for a share of is shrinking anyway (hee hee, mixed metaphors are funny).

Don't get into a market where your customers want to hit you

According to a Mintel report quoted today in the Economist, "Britons are far more satisfied with the service they get from their supermarkets than from their banks". The Economist draws from this the lesson that Tesco should get deeper into retail banking, competing to offer current accounts.

Of course the opposite is the case.

It's not that supermarkets are good at customer service and retail banks are bad, so that for example Tesco will be able to magically do well something at which Barclays and HSBC are failing (in fact, HSBC's First Direct won a top award for customer service only last year). It's that dealing with a retail bank, like dealing with broadband providers, public transport or most branches of the government, is unavoidably infuriating for many customers.

Learning to be the guy who turned down the Beatles

In a recent post I talked about the media tech bubble ("of course it's a bubble"), hypothesising that the clearest sign of a bubble is that every single IPO is being priced as if it's the next Google...which of course they can't all be. So some brief thoughts on why this might be.

Nobody wants to be the guy who turned down the next Beatles (or the next J K Rowling, or perhaps more germanely the next Google) - every industry has its legendary poor dumb bastard, "that guy" who had the Next Big Thing sitting right across his desk and passed. I've worked on acquisition strategies before with people who seemed more concerned than was entirely healthy that they not be "that guy".

Keeping the lizards out (reprise)

As the opportunity to vote for something rolls around once again, I only ask that you consider the following questions.

If you're going to vote for the LibDems, is it because you actually want them to govern, or merely want them to govern more than you want the Tories or the other alternatives? If you you're going to vote for AV, is it because you'd really like to be ruled by people who will be elected under that system, or because you hate that idea slightly less than being ruled by the people likely to be elected under FPTP? Are you, in any sense, being presented with an option that you positively want and endorse?

Every time you turn up and tick one of their boxes, you are legitimating the government. You are preserving the illusion that the goverment governs by the consent of the governed because it has a popular mandate expressed through the ballot box.

It is not a waste of your vote to withhold that legitimacy, if it is not something you wish to confer. It is not a waste of your vote to withhold that consent, if all you can think to do with it is submit to the lesser of several evils. The BNP will not really end up running the country, whatever you do or do not do. And if everyone did it; if no-one turned up to the polls; if the mandate and the legitimacy were withdrawn; then there would the opportunity for actual, meaningful political change.

I leave you, as always, with the definitive words on the subject by Douglas Adams from So Long and Thanks for All the Fish.

Harvesting soft power, squandering soft power

Since Joseph Nye coined the phrase more than twenty years ago the US has gone to great lengths to defend and expand the ambit of its soft power - the message of Hollywood, the American music industry and the whole apparatus of monocultural hegemony that every day is whispered into nearly seven billion ears "America is best. America is right. Everyone would be American if they could".

It isn't, after all, merely the persuasive talents of the music and film industry lobbyists that lead the American congress, senate, president and judiciary to work so tirelessly in the interest of those industries. It's the perfectly sincere self-interest of a great power at work. So when copyright law is endlessly revised at both the statutory and case level to better serve the demands of the MPAA and RIAA; when the diplomatic efforts of the state are turned to expanding that American copyright law to the corners of the earth; when "Homeland Security" means not the fight against post-9/11 terrorism but the seizure of alleged copyright infringing domains; when the rights of American people and technology innovators alike are routinely trampled so that funding continues uninterrupted for the American message; that's America defending its soft power. That's diplomacy, statecraft; what Rochau and Bismarck called realpolitik. 

The odd thing, then, is not that the US will go to such lengths to safeguard its soft power. The odd thing is that the UK baulks at spending less than £250m to safeguard its own.

Another missing secondary market

Last week Victoria Coren wrote that she hopped on a train with an advance purchase ticket, got caught and had to buy a new, expensive ticket. So far so unremarkable, that's how train tickets work now and while yes it's sad that a natural monopoly got privatised by pseudo-Thatcherite zealots who didn't understand the basics of Thatcherism, and yes it's a shame that instead of public transport Britain has a semi-regulated non-market that's little more than a license for train companies to steal, there's no real trick to catching the train you bought a ticket for. 

Bad news for the music business is bad news for everyone

Bad news for the music business is bad news for everyone. Earlier today Charles Arthur identified three bits of bad news for the industry, and I'm going to talk about three more and what it all means for music listeners.

Charles points to Warner Music's poor results, Fred Wilson's weary resort to piracy in the face of the industry's refusal to sell him the album he wanted, and research from Forrester showing music's shift to digital is at best in its early stages.

On top of all that, we also have today's ruling against (now defunct) ACS:Law finding that "if all that is proven is a single download then all that has been lost is one sale...." (more in PC Pro, which has absolutely led on this story); we have the takeover of EMI itself by the bankers at Citigroup; and, in a story now a month old, we have HMV's inability to sell CDs even when the pre-Xmas snowpocalypse brought to a near standstill the postal system on which its online competitors rely. Online, offline, everywhere, changing habits and the shift to digital is hammering the commercial prospects for music.

In the broader historical and technological context the collapse of the music industry's commercial model isn't really a big surprise.

A big society of millionaires?

News that the coalition's Big Society Tsar, Lord Wei, 'is to scale back his hours after discovering that working for free three days a week is incompatible with "having a life"' proves once again that life imitates not so much art as satire. Like The Onion's "fuck everything we're doing five blades" or Daily Mash's once-imaginery TV show "America's fattest bitch", satire finds itself the shortest step behind reality when the man in charge of getting people to give up their time for the Big Society realises he simply hasn't the time.

In fact, the only people who seem able to afford the time to work for the still-nascent Big Society for nothing are those with no need to earn a living - millionaires like Martha Lane Fox and Lord Heseltine. 

Which perhaps suggests an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

BskyB prepares to compete with BT for the UK's next mobile market

BskyB buying The Cloud isn't interesting because it positions them to compete with BT for on-the-move wifi access. It's interesting because it positions both companies to be currently the only players in the next mobile market. 

What we quaintly call our mobile phones are increasingly obviously just sub-scale computers. On a train today I used mine as a 16 gig music player, a Twitter station, a Kindle and a text-messaging system. Next time I buy a phone it'll be the biggest tablet I can fit in my pocket - a reality Tmobile's data cap seems to obviously reflect. Or to put it another way, my need for mobile Internet access on my "phone" so vastly exceeds my need for voice telephony that the market BT, and now Sky, are getting into is the sort of universal Internet access both home and away that will form the basis of my next "mobile phone" contract.

So it's a smart move from Sky, but not one to compete with BT so much as to join BT in eliminating Vodafone, Tmobile, Orange and O2 over the next few years. Voice is increasingly a needles luxury on a mobile phone, especially when it's still used to lock you in to long contracts that can be avoided by going without.  

(Photo from sklathill on Flickr)