The Internet is going to bring a flat playing field to music. The difference between a major and an independent label will begin not to matter anymore. The smallest independent label could have just as wide a distribution – even wider internationally – as the largest major.
Technophiles maintain that the Internet will put an end to the record store, just as indoor plumbing put an end to the outhouse. One day 90 percent of music purchases will take place online, eliminating not just record stores and manufacturers but also record labels.
The record store of the future will have a bed to lie in, a well-stocked refrigerator, a bathroom with a shower and maybe even a couch or two. The record store of the future will be your home … Computer users will simply click their mice on albums they’re interested in, then sit back while the music is transferred, or downloaded, through high-tech telephone lines to their CD drives, which will capture the music on compact disks. Computer printers will spit out album artwork and liner notes. Further in the future, CD’s may be abolished altogether; consumers will be able to listen to whatever song or album they want by ordering it (for a fee) on their cable television box. Record labels would no longer be necessary: anyone with a song and a computer could just put it online.
How large can the flow of money on the nets get before the government requires reporting of every small transaction? Because if the flows can get large enough, past some threshold, then there might be enough aggregate money to provide an economic incentive for transnational service to issue money, and it wouldn’t matter what one government does … It might also be the case that anonymous money will be the only kind of money.
The nature of e-money – invisible, lightning quick, cheap, globally penetrating – is likely to produce indelible underground economies, a worry way beyond mere laundering of drug money … Para-currencies will flourish as the network culture flourishes. An electonic matrix is destined to be an out-back of hardy underwire economies. The Net is so amicable to electronic cash that once established interstitially in the Net’s links, e-money is probably ineradicable.
Wherever information goes, money is sure to follow. By its decentralized, distributed nature, encrypted e-money has the same potential for transforming economic structure as personal computers did for overhauling management and communication structure … Truly digital money – or, more accurately, the economic mechanics needed for truly digital cash – will rewire the nature of our economy, communications, and knowledge.
[Anonymity] seems like the perfect thing for ransom notes, extortion threats, bribes, blackmail, insider trading and terrorism. Tim [May] answers, “What about selling information that isn’t viewed as legal, say about pot growing, do-it-yourself abortion, cryonics, or even peddling alternative medical information without a license? What about the anonymity wanted for whistleblowers, confessionals and dating personals? … One thing for sure, long-term, this stuff nukes tax collection. Without a doubt, this stuff is unbreakable. Encryption always wins.”
You could join a collective to purchase some information and decrease your actual cost by orders of magnitude – that is, until it is almost free. [A digital co-op could form a private online library and collectively purchase digital movies, albums, software, and expensive newsletters, which they would “lend” to each other over the Net] … increasing the margins where the poor can survive.
People buy surface; the paint, something happens to have this feel. I don’t see how the Internet can get around that problem.
The excitement that you get at an auction and the fever that you get that drives the prices up, for instance, I just don’t think you can duplicate online. I know it’s the wave of the future.