Clay Shirky gave a fascinating speech at the NFAIS Annual Conference where he showed how society has difficulty understanding abundance. Our entire economic theory is based around allotting scarce resources – money, natural resources, tangible property.  Shirky says: “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. Society knows how to react to scarcity.” As a society, we are used to only having a few books, CDs, and DVDs, but now it is possible and even feasible to have tens of thousands of each.

As Michael Masnick adds, abundances has not been an issue for most of history. Now technology is introducing abundance and infinite goods into society and we’re struggling to make sense of it. As Masnick says, “It’s a ‘divide by zero’ sort of problem.”

This is why we’re seeing so many companies trying to force scarcity in order to hide abundance. DRM serves that exact function – to make an infinitely reproducible digital file scarce. mp3 and eBook retailers are simply taking brick-and-mortar mentalities of selling single items into a digital space.  Shirky explains how this radical change requires completely new ways of thinking, not just the old system on a new platform.

It’s easy to say “preserve the best of the old and combine it with the best of the new,” but in revolution, the best of the new is incompatible with the best of the old. It’s about doing things a whole new way.

Business models disrupted by abundance (recording industry, newspapers, software and game developers, etc.) need to scrape their old way of thinking. Paywalls for newspapers and more release windows for movies are examples of old businesses trying to force scarcity onto abundance.  These systems do not make sense when anyone can easily copy, share, and view every newspaper article or movie with the few clicks of a mouse.

Of course, when more abundance (well, less scarcity) is introduced, businesses eventually find they can make more money because they have more stuff to sell and more people willing pay for it. Shirky had a great example last year showing how the printing press, and small innovations on printing methods, led to more books which, in turn, made literacy more valuable and thus created more readers. Books were then cheaper to make, but with more readers, publishers could make even more money.  VHS and home video, a great example of the movie industry trying to stop abundance, rather helped to expand the movie market and make it billions more dollars.

Shirky ably frames one of the major problems facing the next generation – changing our understanding of abundance. What once was scarce is now infinite and that requires a whole new approach to business.

Record labels continue to flounder in the face of basic economics and 10 years of failed strategies. As part of their latest flip off to customers, Warner Music Group announced they will stop free streaming of music. While they haven’t clarified whether this means removing all current streaming deals, the idea is likely meant to remove a large portion of music from popular streaming sites like Spotify and Last.FM.

Warner Music claims there isn’t enough money being made from streaming, but once again, Warner Music is ignoring basic economics here and worse, ignoring a large market of customers who they can make money on selling true scarce goods.

First, if customers can’t find your music, then they’ll find someone else who’s willing to stream, share, and use all the marketing tools at their disposal. And for those who want Warner music, well, there are more than enough unauthorized sources that offer no direct revenue back to the labels. So Warner Music’s artists get less exposure and file-sharing still runs rampant. How is this suppose to increase revenue?

Warner Music could use streaming as a marketing tool to increase the value of scarce goods (not music files) like concert tickets, merchandise, or the many other new music business models we’ve seen.  And if they were really smart, they’d stop strangling music streaming services with onerous service charges that make it impossible to innovate and run a business.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been under secret negotiation since 2006 aiming to crackdown on counterfeiting and copyright infringement around the world. Most nations already have many laws against these acts, yet the international community has found the need to establish a completely new trade agreement that officials say will not affect U.S., or other nations’, laws. And as for why it’s being written in secret, that is due to national security, as the Obama administration claims. What counterfeiting and online file-sharing have to do with national security is still top-secret.

I realized I’ve yet to dive into the ACTA controversy on Prodigeek even with my riveted fascination on the subject. Significant documents related to the accord have revealed a scary set of dream proposals written almost exclusively by media companies and those looking for stronger copyright laws. This includes proposals to force ISPs to monitor copyrighted content, instituting a three strikes law banning alleged infringers after 3 warnings, and increasing criminal charges against copyright infringement. Almost no consumer groups have been allowed in the negotiations, and on the rare occasions consumer groups have even been entertained, they have been forced to sign non-disclosure agreements making it very difficult to generate a true public debate. Recently when Mexico opened its discussions, entertainment companies laughed out those who brought up consumer interests. One person who live-Tweeted the event was forced out.

Politicians and media outlets are starting to grasp onto the lack of transparency, but there’s yet to be a public outcry at the content of the trade agreement. The U.S. Trade Representative and lobbyists from media companies continue to claim this agreement will not affect U.S. law while refusing to explain why its needed. What has happened before with TRIPPS and WIPO is exactly that – a trade agreement passes (because it gets less public scrutiny than laws), then Big Content goes around telling countries they have to change their laws to achieve harmony with their international agreements.

Also like TRIPPS and WIPO, the ACTA lacks any concern for consumers and their interests. It’s a trade agreement focusing on protecting powerful industries and supporting their obsolete business models, even going so far as to harm innovation in other industries by increasing penalties  for secondary or contributory infringement (meaning YouTube or eBay would be responsible for what their users do). Don’t believe this will matter, look at South Korea where many of these laws have already been put in place because of, yes, a free trade agreement that is anything but free. Many service providers now ban most music and video uploads for fear of being sued for infringement. Some are being banning advertisements because the advertisement might infringe.

And none of this has anything to do with counterfeiting. Copyright infringement has nothing at all to do with counterfeiting (though the agreement does have some provisions against it, specifically border searches, yay). Counterfeiting, of course, has a much more negative public opinion than file-sharing, hence the bait-and-switch.

So written by lobbyists with little to no public input; the details hidden from the public for unknown national security reasons; major ramifications to U.S. law even though we’re told it won’t; and a trade agreement really all about protecting select industry’s obsolete business models. Sounds like our government at work.

For a more in-depth analysis of the ACTA, make sure to read Michael Geist’s ACTA Guide.

CDs are dying, but the music industry is growing. Newspapers are dying, but journalism is thriving. DVD sales are dropping, but movie attendance is rising. Yet for all this, article after article says the music, news, and movie industry is dead or dying.

These industries are only dying if you classify them in ultra-specific and limiting businesses. CDs drop, but the music industry is selling more concert tickets and merchandise. The U.K. music industry’s own study (pdf) shows the music business overall has increased even though sales of record music has plummeted.  Even as newspapers suffer, hundreds of new journalism organizations are popping up producing original news, commentary, and fact-checking, all for a fraction of the cost, manpower, and time it takes traditional newspapers. And does everyone forget television news continues to grow in audience and revenue (well, at least cable news). And movies, well, attendance is up even in a down economy.

Technology and societal changes often causes radical shifts in how businesses do business. The death of selling plastic discs and packets of paper is, yes, dying, and for the time, these were the most effective ways to make money. With better computers and distribution channels, it is incredibly cheaper to make and distribute movies, music, and news articles.  This means more money to do other things. Or better, cheaper costs to consumers leading to a larger market – and then more fans to sell more stuff to.

The movie and music industries particularly have enjoyed monopoly pricing on their products, and without competition, fans paid the high prices. But competition from technology, even when used illegally, is forcing prices down. Originally, plastic discs were a scarce good the content industry could control, but the digital files on the discs are infinite goods now available free online no matter what.

Let’s remember, selling plastic discs (or records) for music is really only about 60-70 years old. Movies only entered home collections in the 1980s (and followed a significant legal battle where the movie industry claimed home video would destroy them). These industries made tons of money before and they can make even more money now by evolving their business models – recognizing they are in the music or movie or news industry, not just in the sell-discs-and-paper industry.

I love having all my media in one place: on my iPod, media center, or gaming console. Disc switching is so 2004. And slowly entertainment companies are getting it – we want digital downloads of our movies, games, and music. But they don’t understand how we want them priced.

I’m going to skip, for this article, the true economics of digital goods (they’re infinite in supply, they should be free). Instead, let’s start with making them cheaper than their tangible alternatives. Why? There’s a win-win situation here.

First, digital goods save the creator money. The is no packaging, processing, stocking, or shipping. A little hard drive and some bandwidth are all you need. This should all cut substantial costs out of the creator’s bottom line, and that’s savings worth passing along to the customer.

Consumers, while adding the convenience of fewer discs and more content, lack the ability to resell their digital goods, which research shows increases the initial value of tangible goods (you spend more on a car knowing you can resell it for some money, and the same applies to video games and DVDs).

So why are digital goods still priced so high (and by high, I mean, the same price as their tangible counterparts)?

Part of the reason is retail chains are eager to keep customers coming into stores and want DVDs and video games as weekly incentives. Creators might want this traffic for impulse (or non-technical savvy) purchases, but in truth, they are the losers in this arrangement. Creators fight for shelf space often paying premium dollars for ideal placement when digital stores allow for better navigation and unlimited shelf space.

Yes I believe digital goods will eventually all be free (it’s inevitable) and new business models will support their creation. For now, let’s just make the prices fair. Remember, BitTorrent has all this content available for free anyway.

I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, but I know it will be different than yesterday. Obvious, right? Even more obvious, the way we live today is different than 5, 10, and 25 years ago. This is how life works. So why do so many smart people want everything to stay the same.

Richard Corliss for Time Magazine, which alone is having trouble understanding the future of the news business, has several criticisms for Netflix and why it stinks, yet makes certain to contradict himself with his own article. Corliss, a successful movie critic for more than 30 years, has gone blind as to the future and why Netflix is not something to fight, but to embrace. Corliss laments the traditions internet features – no human interaction or leaving the house. Netflix is causing obesity.  It’s also why his local video store closes. Corliss also criticizes Netflix’s wait times (sometimes a whole day) and the dreaded “mail delays and the botched orders.”

Of course, all this is invalidated by Corliss’ own admission that Netflix “has the No. 1 customer-satisfaction rating among online retailers.”  Meaning for all these problems, people really like Netflix and the service it provides (which includes instantly streamed movies to your computer and TV, something he failed to mention).

Corliss, of course, is just about 10 years too late to criticizing Netflix. Does anyone really believe they’ll be renting discs from a store in the next 10 years?

Most of the criticisms against Netflix, Google, YouTube, blogs, and other “new” businesses trends toward the better than/worse now argument from people who were better than/worse now, such as news papers, recording companies, and brick and mortar retailers (and video rentals). But consumers are happy. They have more choice, more convenience, and lower prices leaving them with more time and money to do other things (that’s how an economy grows).

Just after I posted about a tiered model for fan supported video games, Techdirt has unveiled a tiered model of its own.  In order to prove that this tiered model can work, Techdirt is offering a variety of options, selling books, t-shirts, music, and at higher prices, the opportunity to have your business plan reviewed and even have Michael Masnick work for you. For $100,000,000, you can shut down Techdirt for a year. I wonder if there are any copyright maximists pooling their resources. Which tier do you like best?

I often get into arguments about why I don’t think piracy is wrong, but actually helpful to businesses.  The crux of many arguments, from newspapers to music to software, revolves around how people should be paid for their work rather than will people pay for that work.  This is a serious disconnect that explains much of the frustration many feel regarding new business models and free content.

Content creators argue they should be paid for their work. If they aren’t paid for their work, no one will make music, movies, investigative journalism, or video games. We’ll live in a silent, non-fun, corrupt world of animals on skateboards.

But this is not the economic reality.  In capitalism, people can try to make money, but there is no right to it.  600,000 small businesses are started each year and more than 50 percent will fail within the first five years.  No one should have to support these businesses. It’s up to each business to find a market need and fill that need.  While making money is obviously the goal, it is a side effect of effectively meeting a market need.

The content industry (I’m including newspapers and software) certainly filled important market needs – entertainment, productivity products, information and education, etc.  But they got used to a business model based on little competition and monopolies on distribution. The market has changed, but the market need is still there.  People will always want all these products.  But without the monopoly on distribution, consumers have more choice to market products.  More competition drives prices down, and this means for the content industry, the price of content is zero.  The value is still high, but there’s so much of it, you can’t price it higher.  It doesn’t matter if you should be paid for your content.  No one will pay you because another company will fill the market need at the lower price.  This is why you have to treat piracy like a competitor, not a threat, because it’s the market demanding change.

When a company says people should pay, it’s claiming a right and entitlement to compensation.  Obviously, if someone works hard, it’s good to be rewarded, but often hard work comes with the risk you won’t be properly compensated. That is business. It’s competition. It’s healthy for the economy overall.  If companies are guaranteed money, they don’t have to try as hard to earn consumer’s money by creating valuable products that feed market needs.

This is why Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt was so right when he told newspaper executives they shouldn’t piss off consumers.  Consumers decide how they want to consume news, not news executives.  If consumers won’t pay for newspapers, then newspapers will go out of business.  Nothing can change that.  You might think they should or even have to pay, but the economic reality is, they won’t.  Even if piracy is stealing, it’s the economic reality. It’s what the market wants. Nothing can change that.  The successful businesses of the future will learn how to capitalize on this market demand and find new, innovative ways to make money.  Everyone else will get left behind.

Clay Shirky has an excellent article about how the newspaper industry and how technology affects business models. Shocking to many newspaper and music executives, this is not the first time technology has upended business models. Just like before,  the old systems break before new systems are put in place because it takes so much experimentation to find new business models.  Shirky summarizes “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place? The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might.”

Shirky opens with a great quote putting the newspaper predicament in perspective. He quotes Gordy Thompson talking about Usenet piracy of Dave Barry columns. “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”  The problem for newspapers is not a loss of interest in news, but a loss of interest in paper. Do we save newspapers or do we just redefine how get our news?

Shirky states wonderfully how newspapers seem to dwell on how we’ll replace newspapers – that without newspapers, there will be no watchdog for government or business (cause of the bang up job they’ve been doing). But with the fall of one business models leaves open experimentation for a new business model.  Automobiles make horse and buggies obsolete before we have an widespread, paved roads. Or as Shirky highlights, the printing press made for chaotic business models back in the day.

The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.

While it seems we’re giving up newspapers for the hope something new will come along, the truth is newspapers need to fail for the new thing to be worth trying.  And as past transitions have shown, the new model is often more efficient and profitable and better for all parties.

The newspaper industry has been buzzing about building their own iTunes, offering a pay-per-article model with everyone’s favorite buzz word, micropayments.  After a cover article in Time Magazine promoting the model, the idea has joined a larger debate of people who just don’t understand the new economics of news.

Walter Isaacson’s article for Time builds on this misconception that newspapers made the mistake of posting their content online for free, making customers get used to the idea and now unwilling to pay. Alan Mutter even calls this the Original Sin.  So all newspapers have to do to save their ailing industry is agree to charge for every article.

The crux of the micropayment argument is people should pay for news simply because that’s the way it’s been. But economics change. The internet makes sharing news articles incredibly cheap.  With hundreds of thousands of online news sites and blogs spreading news for free, no amount of conglomeration will convince the market to pay for news again.

Let’s look at what happened already. The New York Times tried to charge online subscriptions to its archives. Instead of paying for subscriptions (or per article), customers went to the Huffington Post and blogs to get the same information for free.  Isaacson says newspapers need to prevent others from sharing the content they read, but how does he think this will happen? Mind wipe after reading? Information and news can’t be copyrighted. Once you read a news article, you can tell anyone and everyone what you read.  The value is in being the source material, but if people can’t read the source material, they’re happy to find a secondary source.  Marshall W. Van Alstyne, associate professor at Boston University, likened iTunes for news as putting toll booths in the ocean.  Any barrier to user entry online is easily avoided.

The further problem with iTunes for news is news is not music.  Alstyne elaborates:

News is not like an iTunes song; it’s perishable. Today’s front page is tomorrow’s fish wrap, and we don’t need to replay it. If anything, a reader benefits more from a second source than repetition from the first. Facts are delivered; songs and movies are created. Facts also can’t be owned, so when the Internet places geographically dispersed media in direct competition, the price of facts falls to marginal cost. In digital markets, that’s zero.

With micropayments, suddenly users have to question is each article worth reading.  This is the problem with micropayments in any industry.  Customer willingness to jump from free to $0.01 is much larger than $0.01 to $1. For every article, I have to decide, is it worth $0.01 to me; is it worth taking out my credit card; is it worth typing it in.  And how will article pricing be decided? Will the more important articles be more expensive?  Customers do not want to guess which articles are worth paying for.

News is free now. It has been free for a while – how much do you pay for TV news? Most arguing for pay models for news articles just want things as they were, pretending the economics haven’t changed.   Saving the newspaper industry relies on giving customers more value, not charging more for less (the most popular trend in newspapers has been reducing size but raising prices – less for more).  The key is to recognize the business’ main value – providing news – rather than the method – paper.

50 percent of most newspapers’ budget goes to printing and distribution costs.  With the internet, those expenses disappear. To be profitable, an online newspaper can make half the money it made offline because distribution is so cheap. MediaView posted a list of 14 models being tested for journalism, many with quantifiable success.  Each successful model (not micropayments, included on the list) looks to raise the value for customers.  Micropayments offer nothing valuable for the customer.

For all newspapers’ grandstanding, there are several viable models already working.  Several big cities have free, tabloid dailies handed out to people on their morning commute.  These quick reads offer the greatest hits of the day’s news, focusing on the need to know and leaving you to fill in the blanks online when you get to work. Online news providers are already offering original reporting, from Slate to Salon supported by advertising.

News reporting won’t disappear because there’s always a market demand for good journalism.  But the old guard isn’t offering the market what it wants – the market wants free, up-to-date news. Many want a community to discuss the respond to the news, asking questions or sharing opinions.  The old guard doesn’t understand how this changes their old mentality.  Newspapers are no longer the only purveyors of news, controlling what we see and when.  They need to be part of the communication process. That requires giving customers what they want, not making things like they once were.