Best of luck with your adventures.

Looking forward to watching your story unfold!

Anyway, you’ve raised an interesting concept. I do believe the concept of ownership will change.

Thanks for your thoughtful response. To me, though, it’s not as simple as accepting that people are going to violate copyright law. You’re right, they are, but to just fold and accept seems premature. Would you say the same for patents? I mean, right now, music is in the forefront of the discussion because copying it is so easy, but other things will soon become easy to copy, too. As this happens, do we we just give up on the whole notion of ownership? I don’t think so. I wish I had a clear, concise, convincing solution to this mess, but I don’t.

Jeff

Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment. While I’m very tempted to go into the ethics and values of copyrights, piracy, etc. I will refrain from it, because in this case (and in the case of my thesis) it’s besides the point.

Unless it’s election time or you have enough money to run a major lobby, you’re not going to be able to influence the reality of copyright enforcement. Therefore in my thesis, I encourage to focus on what you do want, instead of on what you don’t. I start off with a few premises – a couple of realities that come with the digital age. They might not always be here, but they will be here for the next decade at least.

One of these realities are that you have to compete with free. Plain and simple; if you’re popular, people are going to share your music and make it available for free. I don’t care so much about the ethics part, I care much more about what this means for business.

This price versus value section helped build-up this part about the assumptions, premises, realities, etc. The model I developed takes into account all these realities, acknowledges them and builds upon them.

Sometimes I call it a ‘piracy-neutral’ model, meaning that if everyone would download your music for free instead of paying for copies; it wouldn’t matter. Actually, I think it would benefit (when using this ecosystem model), although I do not have the statistics to back that up.

Anyway, the whole ethical discussion about this is very interesting, but for most artists it’s really not efficient to focus on this, when they could put that same energy into developing their work, their products, services, business models, relationship with fans, etc.

If I had to choose a vision, it would probably be Falkvinge’s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPEO-u_c0t0 (short version)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08gfh_6sbQI (long version – close to 1 hour)

There are a lot of synonyms, but I use the word ecosystem for a good reason.

Yes, it’s a tribe, movement, community, fanbase… But why I use the word ecosystem, is because that is the only word that conveys the organic nature of what’s going on. What it conveys is that when the ecosystem gets unbalanced, it will figure out a way to ensure its own existence.

An example of this is mentioned in the Shpongle case-study. The label announced they were in trouble and fans started devising ways in which they could help the label they loved so much. I.e. pre-ordering 2 CD’s, so they could give one as a gift to someone. Replacing that old merchandise sweater, etc. You could literally see the ecosystem striving for continued existence.

I also think that if an artist that is known for being genuine, suddenly makes a very commercial album and starts sending out a lot of marketing messages and sponsored messages, it will breach the trust with the ecosystem… which will then reject part of itself (the artist), break up into smaller groups and (some of those groups will) move on.

I think the increased interconnectedness and possibilities of non-linear communication between community-members has enabled this ecosystem. It was always there, but now its processes run so fast, that its reality has become clearly visible.

My background is in communication management (let’s say PR & marketing), so I’m quite picky with my words… As Mark Twain once said: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

This is why I use the phrase ecosystem.