How are you going to become famous ?
Joi and I talked about Creative Commons today. Very interesting conversation that Joi already talked about.
To really understand what's happening, I *REALLY* advise you to see this 5 minutes flash presentation to understand how everybody is going to *SKIP* the intermediaries.
Joi says Copyrights is technically impossible in a fully digital environment because from the users' prospective you say "look at this, hear this song, etc", share it with your friends is a natural thing. Culture spreads from sharing. Only in a brief period of history is broadcasting the way for people to find out about things. Blogging and adwords are growing crazy because people want this information, they want to share.
The model where you have a monopoly on someone's attention like tv channels and other mass media use that audience to buy content breaks down.
How much time are you spending reading blogs? More and more. These mass media where people want to get paid to make you see it is competing against make it available for free content. Professionals are competing against amateurs, the tools are cheaper and the amateur quality content is growing. The amount of money people can pay to get copyright content is decreasing, it is a broken model.
Hollywood will fight but lose.
When you start getting videos from friends and sharing them is natural and increases quality of our experience. If the mass media and majors make it available so that you can't copy it, can't read it more than once, can't share it with your friends then users will just go more and more to the non professional content.
Lawrence Lessig's book was made simultaneously available on line and in print, and it makes the sales of the book higher, just because people can share it and talk about it. Most of them still want the physical experience of the book and that will stay.
Dan Gillmor's upcoming book on the future of journalism with the blogs has been online since the beginning and Dan is getting incredible value for the book from the comments people made, I guess some ideas that came from the comments Dan would not have even think about. And if Dan is doing this, he bets that it will not hurt the sales, and I am sure it will not. Check Dan's book as it is being writen, it is really good.
People buy no more packaged content. In Japan the girls are spending their money 1/3 on their cell phone, 1/3 on food and 1/3 on clothing, so there is no market for mass media anymore, demand. Mass traditional media models are based on advertising, they try to impose a brand or an artist to the masses. It worked when they had the monopoly of the audience, not anymore. People will just watch TV less and less.
It will hurt Madonna but 99% of artists don't make money anyway so it will help the 99% others.
So how are you going to become famous if you are an artist or a writer if copyrights and mass media do not allow people to share and discuss the content you created? Well, make it available with some rights reserved, share it as much as you can and understand if people think it has value. Then you will be famous if people like it. The old model where people would try to push a brand or a music band to you through a mass media to you is just over.
