Napsterization: The Content Crisis

Napster was a huge paradigm shift for marketers- turning the distribution model on it's head. Technology has created disintermediation, which means the mediators who made millions by controlling content were left out in the cold. The same process is happening in every industry that relies on the control of information for their livlihood. This article by Demir Barlas describes what is happening in publishing: "Today, content distributors are afraid of public choice and want instead to beat it into temporary submission with advertising. This is not a secret strategy. Hollywood executives talk quite openly about 'saturation' marketing aiming only to get a handful of gullible viewers in to see a terrible movie on its opening weekend. If enough rubes see the movie, it doesn't matter that it sucks, or that no one will remember it in three weeks' time. It's all a hustle. Except on the Internet. Here, you choose. Google Books and Amazon actually do put the world's literature on an equal basis, and this is what probably bugs the hell out of Newton. He wants a kind of Nineteen-Eighty Four world in which a handful of oligarchs control screens, minds, and programming, and the Web is like that hammer-throwing woman in Ridley Scott's Apple commercial from 1984." Beware Doctors and Lawyers- your next and I can't wait to see what you try to do about it.