The Web is … the future of direct-response marketing … Of course, anybody who believes that all of this is not going to have a first-order-magnitude impact, particularly on the entertainment business, is incredibly foolish and will probably end up at a huge competitive disadvantage.
I believe in electronic distribution … There’s a bandwidth problem. There’s a packaging problem. I want it to sound exactly as good as a CD we press in the plant. I want the graphics to be exactly as good as what we print in the plant. The typical home is not soon going to have such sophisticated, full-color printing capability. And perhaps never will.
The Internet, and online interactivity in general, is going to have a profound impact on the music business … If we don’t adjust and adapt, we might get steamrolled. I’d like to see the industry start to attack the opportunity in an aggressive, coordinated fashion, so we have standards we can all live with.
A wave of Net-based telephony products have the telcos’ long-term seers shakin’ in their recently deregulated boots. You heard it here first: the voice business is dead. Repeat: it’s not even a commodity; it’s doomed. The telcos know it, too.
Considering how broadly the new communications landscape is beginning to reshape the movie business, it’s remarkable how little these changes have been reflected in what we see on screen … In the next couple of years, we can expect no end of stock movie plots ported into cyberspace: we’ll get our fill of romantic triangles and monster capers and slasher stories and teen comedies. Hollywood isn’t going to rewrite its whole playbook just because a new medium has emerged, and that’s too bad … we’re still waiting for the artists who can capture the experience of networked communications, who can limn Net life in memorable images.
Print may pass away but words and stories survive; a good story is worth a dozen jeremiads any day.
Soon grad students will be turning to a new field of study called “cyberanthropology.” Rather than dig through the rusting metal of a municipal dump, anthropologists of the future will be able to confine their work to their computers. Financial records, marketing data, political mailing lists, even Quicken backup disks – all of it will provide fodder for scholarly articles in 3109, as researchers try to understand what life was like in the 20th century.
Pundits tell us the Net will simplify the distribution of music. But why not carry the idea a step further and use the Net to create music? What we would need is a real-time, multiuser program called Net Jam. Net Jam would handle musical input such as MIDI or SMPTE. The main interface would be a mixing console with which you set volume and tone for each of the participants. Current average settings of the participants in the jam would be displayed in bar graphs. This makes participation meritocratic: if you don’t play well enough for anyone to turn your music up above the background noise, then you aren’t contributing.
While I can’t shed any new light on the debate over how fast the Internet is growing, I can safely tell you that the number of books about the Internet is doubling every month. Perhaps this excess of landfill is the book industry’s way of thumbing its nose at pundits who predicted the Internet would kill print media. But who could have predicted people would buy books that are out of date by the time they are printed?
Because people are used to owning information, not leasing it, tangible forms of media like CD-ROM will be with us for a long time.