GILASTATE

So, is DRM evil? My opinion is maybe.

First off, you really have to consider who the potential evilness applies to. Take the case of music. While the music labels predictably trot out artists when they talk about the harm piracy causes, the story of whom gets hurts is significantly more complex. There is an interesting paper that examines this question with an economic focus called Rockonomics.

While I can’t given an adequate summary of the paper here, I’ll nevertheless try to some extent. One of the more interesting points in the paper is that most bands don’t make any money off of media (e.g.- CDs), but instead make most of their profit from touring. Only the most popular bands sell enough albums to make any money above and beyond the initial advance the band may get for an album. These advances are used to cover the production of the album, marketing, and associated activities. So, if you’re in a small band and can take advantage of the Internet and new technologies to reduce your up-front costs of producing, marketing, and distributing an album, then it would be in your best interest to avoid the whole record label business arrangement. Just let your music be free and then hope the consumers find your music, like it, and subsequently attend your concerts where you would have made all your money anyway (unless you’re U2 or another of only the most popular bands).

Of course, DRM doesn’t really have anything explicitly to do with piracy, so the preceding argument is only peripherally related to DRM- it is really more about trying to enforce payment for music or giving it away. Record labels obviously couch this all in terms of theft and piracy given they stand to lose a lot. They don’t make anything off of concerts, so protecting the sanctity of the current distribution model is critical to them. There probably aren’t too many Internet business models that end with them being better off, so DRM is evil incarnate to them.

So, it’s all good for the consumers and musicians? Even assuming we don’t care about the top artists (for example, we might think they are all sell-outs), there might be some broader issues at play that would hurt consumers and smaller bands. First, if you can’t find music easily (aka- marketing), then small bands can never develop a large enough fan base to support touring and the consumers never hear about that album that ended up changing their lives. Of course, the Internet and social networking tools might help here, but there doesn’t seem to be any clear evidence of this model working yet that I can see. Most bands still pursue the record label path, so they are caught up in that entire system and it is not a clean example of what is possible. The other potential downside is what happens to the albums that do require large up front costs. A smaller band could never cover the costs associated with a large production. Whereas, now, the labels can produce huge albums (cost-wise) assuming they think they can make that money back.

Beyond music, think about movies. As much as I like small bands and can see how the quality I get from a band is independent of how much the band spends up front to some extent (what did Surfer Rosa cost to produce?), I do occasionally enjoy movies with lots of sfx. While music and movies are different, the same copyright rules apply, so I doubt we could say DRM is evil for music, but not movies. We could also examine the same questions in regard to software.

Hence, I think DRM is maybe evil.

Osaifu-Keitai is a service from NTT’s DoCoMo which is yet another example of how the U.S. carriers are missing the boat in terms of mobile convergence. With the small form factor of a standard mobile phone, Japanese carriers like DoCoMo are providing needs based convergence in ways that only exist in VC’s dreams here in the States. While there is some noise about m-commerce here, it is a long way off- especially if it relies on the marketing prowess of the U.S. wireless carriers.

While I can’t read all of the DoCoMo site, it seems that they are providing a much more open platform for content and applications than firms like Verizon. On the commerce side, they seem to allow many firms to use the Osaifu-Keitai prepaid platform. DCMX is apparently the credit version of the same platform. While one could debate that the platform is only open in respect to DoCoMo’s service, it is still more open than Verizon and therefore seems to indicate some openness is better than none. What if Google is really able to offer a popular and truly open application platform as the rumors seem to suggest they may? Might openness take the day?

Interestingly, in terms of technology convergence, Osaifu-Keitai is a combination of RFID and Internet based mobile phone services. The term for these devices is wallet phones which is appropriate given it offers needs based convergence by incorporating the need to be able to pay for things on the go (traditionally met by the wallet).

It is definitely going to be interesting to see how this market evolves in the U.S.

I was told that on average your musical preference is centered around the music you most enjoy at the age of 24. While I am sure that there was a fair amount of variability in this estimate it is interesting to think about from a consumer perspective. If, for example, a consumer happens to most identify with music from this specific time period due to some emotional connection to that time, might they also have preferences for particular service models or technologies which are associated with this time period. I know there is a fair amount of research on technology adoption by age, but the really interesting part might be to consider how to connect people to that time either though music or other emotional links to that time.

This would sort of be the generational, service version of steampunk. For example, if people are more comfortable with dealing with a person than a graphical interface, might using an avatar in the style of that person’s “peak time” connect more to their preferences more than an avatar representing the current time?

Of course, I’m not sure if this peak time concept would really resonate in a service context. Could an avatar or even music from my peak time really make me feel more comfortable about a service experience. For example, would these guys really influence my perspective on some generic service experience?

Well, actually, now that I think about it- yes, it would be awesome if they were somehow associated with a service experience. Can you imagine if the dentist was playing Hope? Or how about NOFX’s The Decline? In either case (even though The Decline is from 1999 and Hope is from when I was in junior high), that would be so rad and I would give them a perfect service score regardless of what the service actually was.