Read USA Today for Great Insights

I thought that headline might grab you.

I used to be one of the people that upon waking up in a US hotel, would reach around the door handle and grab the newspaper in a plastic bag before groaning as i pulled it into the room ready to stick the coffee maker on: “man – not USA Today again”

Its easy to fall back on the ‘I would rather read a “real” newspaper position’. Such as The New York Times. But I just needed to be educated.

The guy that got me reading more closely and appreciating the resources USA Today puts into real reporting was Byron Acohido. He is one of the most thorough journalists i have met in tech. full stop. You know Byron is never going to take you out of context or sex up the story for no good reason. Byron will carry out multiple interviews before going into print, and when you talk to him you know he feels a strong responsibility to his readers. He doesn’t want to dumb it down but he fights for clarity. He wrote this analysis which not surprisingly got some blogosphere attention.

Anyhow, these days i have left a lot of my snobbery behind thanks to Byron. I just scan page one, and then move to finance and tech. I am happy – there is plenty of signal there if you filter out the noise.  

So i was looking at USA Today, doing a little ego-surfing for a story Byron is working on, when i saw this column by Kevin Maney, If pirating grows, it may not be the end of music world. The reason this story is, too my mind, as insightful as anything Tom Friedman has been putting forward around global flattening, is that its so… pragmatic about the nature of business. and it so thoroughly understands that the future is increasingly Sino.

Its one thing to point out that something can’t really be criminal if that makes the majority of us criminals, a common argument by free culture advocates. But the argument becomes so much more powerful when we look outside our own parochial borders to understand how things are working out in China. Even Jay Berman is apparently getting a clue; if this quote attributed to him in the story is correct: “The business model for the record industry worldwide is moving toward resembling what we see in China today.”

The USA Today piece is is as strong as anything i have read by people like Cory Doctorow (and i happen to think Cory is one of the smartest people in a pool of extremely smart people).  And this article is in USA Today, which is by definition mainstream. Go figure.

I am getting pretty bored of the frame that runs: emerging economies need to start protecting American and European media interests with stronger copyright and IP laws. That way chilling effects lie. Having just read James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of The Crowds, in particular its rather splendid articulation of how science works in practice, and benefits from openness, I am pretty fired up about the need for freeflow of information.

“This tradition of open publication and communication of insight was, of course, central to the success of Western Science…. The challenge the scientific community faces today is whether the success of Western science can survive the growing commercialization of scientific endeavors” p.167

Which brings us back to China, the subject of so much FUD about IP from folks that should know better. We have surely adopted and adapted far more technology invented in China than it has taken from us. But that’s a different can of worms – so back to media and music sales.

From USA Today

Yu Quan, like every music act in China, gets almost no income from CD sales, even though millions of its CDs have been sold. As soon as a CD is made, the pirates are on the street, offering them for a fraction of the retail price. Stores sell pirate copies. Legitimate CDs all but vanish.

So artists have to regard CDs as essentially promotional tools, not as end products. Yu Quan makes money by performing concerts, getting endorsement deals and appearing in commercials. If people hear and like Yu Quan’s songs on pirated CDs, at least they’ll be more likely to come to the concerts and buy what the duo endorses.

It’s possible that this is the future of the global music industry. And even though that sounds dire for music and musicians, surprisingly it might not be.

And continues

Chinese rock stars aren’t getting as wealthy as, say, Michael Jackson, but Quek raises an interesting question: Why should they? Only a relatively few American rockers ever sell enough CDs to get fabulously rich. Should society care if rockers can’t afford to build their own backyard amusement parks?

The vast majority of music artists bob along in the middle. They don’t sell enough CDs to earn out their advances. They earn a living on the road and maybe from publishing royalties if they write songs. Such artists would benefit if the industry shifted to a model that includes more — and more innovative — ways for artists to make money.

I kind of like this vision of the world, and its the way things are moving. The days of the Platinum seller are numbered. For a great exposition, including record industry sales data, look no further than the LA Weekly. Alec Hanley Bemis:

The biggest, most famous artists are no longer posting ever more impressive sales figures. Suddenly, there are more and more records selling 10,000 to 500,000 copies each year, and less and less selling 1 million to 10 million. To put it simply, the patterns that used to govern sales no longer work. The industry’s biggest successes are now small ones.

Industry insiders are just as confused by the good news as they are by the bad. Here are the kinds of questions they’ve been asking themselves: Why doesn’t Eminem break out on the order of the Beatles and sell 10 million copies of every release?

A different economics is emerging. Should it really surprise us it would do so in “emerging economies”? China and India are where the future is happening. I am fairly impressed USA today is on that case.