Monday, January 19, 2009

To Sir With Love (Michael Stipe and Natalie Merchant)...click here

One of my 'forever young' buddies, Mr Brahms, sent me two great videos over the weekend highlighting the incredibly uplifting interplay between two amazing artists. If you enjoyed the first, here's the second one . If these don't get you out of your chair, here's REM with the BOSS playing Born to Run.

While watching them over and over again, and forwarding to my rock 'n roll leaning friends, it appeared to me that we are in the midst of an accelerating shift in media consumption highlighted by young vendors, such as Tversity and Boxee. It seems that the market emphasis will accelerate its shift from ownership (bringing YOUR content to YOUR device) and towards access (bringing content from the CLOUD to YOUR device).

As the market shift accelerates, old folk (who still consume a disproportionate % of entertainment sales) will join our younger brethren in adjusting our consuming habits from primarily playing purchased content, to consuming streamed content from the cloud. In fact, absent a substantially enhanced consumption experience, you probably won't ever download it, and significantly, most probably discovered it from one of your 'forever young' friends. The social aspect makes it far more directed, and complementary to, internet based radio (where vendors such as Pandora balance serendipity with controlled discovery).

It is still murky how vendors concentrating on the discovery aspect of media sharing will make money, though let's harken back a few years to a time when the music vendors were staring at the abyss of their IP being devalued (stolen) to zero, and along came Mr. Jobs and gave consumers an experience where they preferred buying IP, to stealing it.

It is clear that one innocent link can launch a consumer (like me) on hours of joyful discovery. This has real value that I would pay for. There's a pony somewhere here worth owning.

Enjoy MLK day....it's a big couple of days in the US.

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