Quote:
Originally Posted by Lanik42
And alternate view might be that P2P is a natural (if not wholly legal) reaction to artificial and profit driven barriers to acquiring music that people like.
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This.
Someone asked before what gave the gatekeepers the right and expertise to decide what to allow through the gate and what not. The answer is that, traditionally, they are a profit-drive business. So gatekeepers have a vested interest in letting in the gate only what sells; therefor, they only let in what is popular or which is likely to be popular. But they do take risks, and invest millions in printing and marketing and promotion which are vital for the top end of commercial writers to actually make a living at it.
However, the advent of mass marketing, communications, and consumer psychology have allowed things to become skewed (and this is true of virtually all businesses). Often instead of investing the money to allow new writers to become discovered and thus become popular. it becomes more profitable for the publishers to spend that money on marketing to get more people to buy existing writers. Or writers that fit within pre-defined buckets of what sells.
Take a look at the modern bookshelf. How many of those books are parts of series or franchises? You seem the same thing happening in Hollywood. Rather than produce new stuff, it becomes economically rational to produce more and more of the same stuff. It's the innovator's dilemma all over again.
Ebooks change the rules of the game just like the Internet did for other forms of mass media. Publishers will adapt. But meanwhile there is plenty of opportunity for new gatekeepers, and for direct sale between author and consumer. Piracy is mostly a symptom that the consumer needs in the market are not being served. I used to have to bittorrent episodes of programs I missed; now I can catch them on my Tivo, or if I didn't record it, on demand from my cable company, or, far more likely, on Hulu.