Thomas Jefferson, Needles and Haystacks

Easy replication of music, easy transmission and no barriers to the exchange. The result: information freely accessible to larger numbers of people. Should be a good opportunity to have a larger potential market. But, not all of the additional audience is interested in paying for the information. Of course, observers claim critics do not buy music. But there cannot possibly be a market full of critics causing the shortfall.

As with any form of commerce, the stepping stone to profitable exchange starts with recognition of a particular good or service. The creator has not abandoned the work and thus the economic value of the work needs to be established in the marketplace.

Because music can be characterized in quality terms (AM radio, MP3, CD), freshness (live, recorded), recorded versions, as well as the uniqueness of a particular performance (Madison Square Garden 1980) there is a lot of room for artists and their managers to get busy identifying profitable market opportunities, and seizing them.

Fact: All industries will sooner or later need to evaluate the open accessibility of value-added information. Increasingly it is information alone which differentiates between the strength of a particular company vis-a-vis its competitors. Design, sales lists, distribution plans are all information valuable to any given corporation. The cost of advertising is likely to rise at a rate much faster than other costs as recognition gives the chance for a sale. For musicians, the market is "easily" defined as those who want to pay for the work of the artists.

The music business just happens to be the first where the value-added information, or music, has been de-coupled from the means of distribution.

Seventy years ago, radio was intended to provide wireless communications points for consumers. The cost benefit versus laying and maintaining wires was deemed opportunistic. The initial stations for radio broadcast were thus intended as wireless communications ports, while the ability for third parties to listen in on a transmission was thought of as an inconvenience. The advantage of radio transmission was economically powerful. Until business interests recognized an even greater economic benefit was afforded by radio transmission in aggregating "listeners," advertising and broadcast industries were incapable of real time performance. It is with the origination of radio that music was de-coupled from recognition. Essentially, live performances could be substituted with radio broadcasts making identification of the performers more difficult but less expensive than with the promotion and sale of phonographs. That the business of selling music was able to relate performance to the sale of prerecorded songs regards the value that is bound in an easily recorded, stored or broadcasted signal.

Recognition continues to be the single most important aspect of selling any good or service. That radio sells CDs is well known but rarely analyzed.

How many stations state the name of the artist and song? How quickly do listeners convert a listening experience into a purchase? The Internet represents similar barriers to the successful marketing and sale of music as all of the previous formats for both storage and transmission of audio signals. That a network can offer both prerecorded and broadcast versions of the same signal is an issue of significance: why is the stored version any different from the streamed version? The difference is that while perfect copies are possible, the breadth and variety of music now available is likely to have more difficulty in finding an audience: stored or streamed. The anticipated debate over rights between two very profitable industries seems to hinge on an old concept. To the chagrin of computer-related interests seeking to "restrict" use of content on digital platforms, with concepts such as digital rights management (DRM) and "trusted systems," media companies maintain consistence on the single issue evident since the advent of consumer electronic devicesresponsibility over copies.