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Old 05-28-2008, 10:20 AM   #21
Shaggy
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It's a different business model, and makes sense if you think about it. In a digital world, your intellectual property (mp3, ebook, whatever) has an infinite supply. You can try to artificially limit the supply in order to give value to the product (DRM, aggressive coyright enforcement, etc), but that's almost impossible to control (as we've seen). They obviously have artistic value, that's why people want them, but because it's trivial to create an infinite supply they have little (if any) financial value. The general idea with changing the business model is that you give away the things that have an infinite supply, and sell things where you can control the supply/demand. Either charging for services instead of products, as in live performances, concerts, etc. Or else charging for traditional physical products, as in t-shirts, posters, etc, including your time/labor in producing/marketing those physical products.

What many people are saying is that the concept of creating something that is trivial for anybody to copy/distribute and trying to make a living off of artificially limiting the supply is doomed to failure. As with any other profession, you need to earn your living by either doing or producing something that people can't easily do themselves. That's what provides your product/service with value.

It's not that you're doing more work for the same profit, it's that the original item (the easily copied/distributed intellectual property) doesn't have much profit potential because there's little financial value in it. In order to make a profit, you need to do other things.
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