Been pondering a bunch of things lately and getting exposed to some new ideas (another contributor to the writing hiatus) and wanted to start sharing some of them with you – since these are very broad concepts it is difficult to be brief and completely clear, so I am hoping the comments on this one will help iron them out a bit.
One idea that particularly hit home for me was the idea of creating an REI like music service – where the artists, managers and consumers all have a stake that is formulaicly distributed to each based on creation/consumption patterns – the ecosystem itself would continue to invest in the development of the system that facilitates it and provides enjoyable, rich entertainment experiences both online and in person. It would seem SNOCAP is the closest to this sort of ideal ecosystem, though it could be argued that eMusic‘s focus on indies is also (I agree to a certain extent). But in this variation, there would be a real community with admittance requirements for professionals and accountable to all members via open governance and management. Uniquely this community system would provide the following functions: Facilitate collaboration between artists and producers, use BitTorrent like file sharing/distribution systems, enable fan clubs, offer a Pandora like radio station, charge as a subscription service like Yahoo’s, includ the music of others according to the Creative Commons based license choice, enable the remixing by consumers who end up getting creator financial credits out of the system and all of those other pieces that we all know to be the real desirable experience of music lovers.
Perhaps Mark Cuban could do this for HD content. I just saw a performance of Pink Floyd from Live 8 which I absolutely would have paid for if I could have downloaded an HD version to watch on my home theatre – probably not a lot, so it may be more like an HD version of Current.tv where a lot of the content is free with a subscription, but semi-professional reporter/creator’s could track down compelling stories of the world and with some recognition and a higher value offering, people would be willing to pay a small premium directly to the creator. BTW – creator’s in this sense includes the bedroom based Mac production studio of individual’s as well as organized groups of people that may be students, general associates or part of a traditional television production company. Or perhaps Mark is already planning this and I just did not har that interview yet….
More to come – in briefer snippets over the coming weeks…
