Blogcritics: Comments on Entertainment Crystal Balls

Comment by Mark Saleski

Thu, 4 Sep 2003 15:28:01 EDT

i don't see this happening. maybe in more than just a few years....but certainly not in five. kids may enjoy downloading and playing music on their computers but there are still a fair amount of people out there who care about good (if not great) sound, and the computer doesn't have much to do with that. this is the same argument that has been made about books....it's just not happening.

Comment by Tom Johnson

Thu, 4 Sep 2003 12:40:30 EDT

I'm still not convinced that people aren't going to want a physical product to keep. It's one thing to download, for free, but I think after a while people may tire of the effort required to get what they want. Yeah, it's all out there to download, but you still have to find it, and you have to wait for it to download, and then when you finally get it, you have to make it available to yourself on some form of media - disc or Ipod, most likely. Kids have seemingly unlimited free-time with which to do all this, but as an adult, my free-time is money and if I'm sitting there doing all this, I'm really losing money. I still think people will wind up, eventually, realizing they've wasted a lot of time on intangible electronic files when they could have just paid for actual discs and artwork. At some point, someone is going to realize that paying $10 to iTunes for a bunch of lossy files and zero extras is a ripoff - because it is.

Comment by John Mudd

Thu, 4 Sep 2003 12:31:58 EDT

Interesting. I was telling all my friends that in 1995 and 1996 when the Internet just started to get hot, and they all said I was out of my mind. Looks like I wasn't, after all. In the 20th century intellectual property was made into something material, something tangible, but in the 21st century, it appears that it will revert back into its intellectual origin, simply so consumers can access it more conveniently. The record industry should've seen this coming in 1995 so it could dominate the market, thus, adding value to it. At this point, it's bound to lose money over the overwhelming trend to make intellectual property more disposable for convenience purposes, allowing consumers to purchase it more easily than before.