The iPhone Is Not A Phone

And this is not a radio station.

Old media is dying; their electronic toll roads and controlled distribution have been usurped. I don't watch news at 11. I can't bear the false drama and carefully timed commercial breaks. Controversy replaced Journalism in order to sell more advertising.

Technology renders Technology obsolete.

The cloud will not be downloaded. There's little need. The cloud can be streamed. And the millions upon millions that record companies paid to the RIAA to sue the parents of kids raised on Tivo would have been better spent finding the next Dylan/Zepplin/Stones/Doors/Joplin/etc/etc/etc.

But the record companies realize that this is not about controlling the revenue due to their artist. It's about controlling distribution. They make money because they stand between what is wanted and those who want.

Their control over distribution is being usurped.

Suckas.

Radio is ubiquitous - but you have control over genre, not specific content. And the advertisers were clever enough to stand between the content and the listener.
-
Satellite radio simply generated revenue by charging the listener rather than the advertiser.
-
The iPod allowed you to control content without advertisers - but you paid (mostly...be honest) to get the content into your little white box, that still limits selection to around 25,000 songs. Sure, that's a lot of selection (figure 3MB per song = 300 per GB = 25,000 songs on an 80GB iPod). But who has the time to rip and burn that much content? Figuring 1 minute per song for 25,000 songs? Over 400 hours. Over 17 days. Fugettaboutit.

But what if content was ubiquitous, you could control it, there were not advertisers and it was free? What if everyone just played their music and everyone else could just listen?

Well. That would make record execs shutter. They'd say things like, "The internet has opened a 'Pandora's Box'." Because they think the moral to the story of Pandora's Box was that all this bad stuff got out that could never be put back in. Because they're motivated by fear.

But the moral of Pandora's Box was a single word: Hope.

http://www.pandora.com/