-----Original Message-----
From: Crosbie Fitch 
Sent: Tuesday, 7 November 2000 4:12pm
To: Clay Shirky
Subject: RE: The Napster-BMG Merger

There are two processes: 1) Fans buying music from their favourite artists, 
and 2) artists trying to get any or more fans.

The first process can now be done with no rip-off from the middle men.
The second... well yup, that's another matter entirely.

I guess that's effectively what you just said anyway... :-)

Regards,

Crosbie.

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Clay Shirky
Sent:	Tuesday, 7 November 2000 3:46pm
To:	Crosbie
Subject:	Re: The Napster-BMG Merger

> The fact remains though that the musicians have seen the industry quake and
> crumble. They have had a glimpse of their fans directly through the chink
> that Napster opened.
> They will begin to realise that they can cut out the middle-man and deliver
> their music direct to their millions of fans.
> "So let's see... How much will my single get me at 10 cents a piece for a
> million downloads? $100,000? I can live with that."

Nope. The bottleneck just moves. The bottleneck was production, now
the bottleneck is attention. How many minutes do you have budgeted
each day for discovering new music? Almost none, if you're like most
people -- instead, you outsource the job to music magazines and DJs. 

Most fans don't care that artists want to sell directly to them --
from your point of view, there are many many many more minutes of bad
music than good music in the world, whatever your taste, and there is
no way you are going to be willing to let those artists email you
music at home -- you will want a filter.

The industry will beocme that filter. Only a small piece of the
industry operation is in the business of actually producing plastic
circles, the rest, from A&R through marketing, is in the business of
presenting music to fans as a way of getting through the attention
bottleneck.

> BMG will at most enjoy 1% commission for facilitating the
> transaction.

BMG likely won't measure 'transactions' at all. The world is moving
away from per-unit charges for music. BMG will take more than 1% of
the gate, though.

-clay

--
Clay Shirky                 |    shirky.com - Essays on the Internet:
http://www.shirky.com/      |        Culture, Economics, Globalization

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