One last post before vacation. Cringely has an interesting new business model for a music distribution business. He envisions a publicly held company where the shareholders mutually own a library of 100,000 music CDs, and they are allowed to download backup copies of these songs at the bandwidth cost of $0.05 per song or $0.50 per album. Totally legal under current fair use copyright law, though as he points out the RIAA would mount a campaign to legislate this out of existence.
He continues with a detailed ananlysis of the IPO market capitalization, which would be of significant, if secondary, benefit to the shareholders. In all, he makes the case that this new business model will accelerate the change that is washing over the music industry. Mr. Charlie would be proud.
July 24, 2003