business models

Recently Spotify launched its app platform, a significant step into a future where music licensing can function like an API.

A few months back, I met with the CEO of a rather successful indie label, talking about business models and strategy.

His label had already done a number of really creative and innovative things with its artists, and had found a fair bit of success that way.

The label was trying out a number of cool technologies, and I was pretty impressed at the overall strategy.

Steve Ballmer is the latest Microsoft exec to whine about how much "piracy" is costing the company in China, noting that they make so much less in that country than in the US, despite similar numbers of PCs being sold in each country.

I'm always amazed when people accuse us here at Techdirt of being "anti-creator." Considering how much time and effort we spend showing content creators how they can make more money, and highlighting examples of cool and profitable new business models, it's one of the more bizarre criticisms.

Since we talk a lot about the use of "free" in business models, it's common for people to assume that we love any and all business models that use "free." In particular, one assumption is that we think all "freemium" business models are great.

However, that's simply not the case. What we're talking about here is how and when to use free in a business model.

A few folks have sent over Cory Doctorow's recent Guardian column on "persuading people to pay" in the digital era when things are free.

I've been noticing a really silly trend lately, of copyright maximalists trying to "debunk" people who actually understand the economics of content, by trying to sarcastically equate money to content and then saying "if it's okay to copy content then isn't it okay to copy money?" It's an argument stemming from pure ignorance, mixed with an unhealthy dose of smugness, and we should try to pop this bubble before it goes much further.

One of the interesting things we've seen in talking with various content creators who seem down on some of the new business models that are out there, is that they balk at the realization that some of them involve real work.

We point to examples of musicians better connecting with fans and giving them reasons to buy, and we get critics mocking those because some of them involve such horrible things as having to do actual work or involve (horror!) actually having to go out and talk to fans.

We've written a few times in the past about Flat World Knowledge, a textbook publisher that really seems to have embraced the sort of business models we discuss.

It gives away digital versions (the infinitely abundant kind) of its textbooks for free, but charges for the scarcities, such as printed copies.

I'm running around SXSW this weekend, so let's just get right to it. On the insightful side there were simply no standouts this week.

A bunch of comments all were pretty closely ranked, so we'll go with the top two and then an editor's choice (which was ranked 4th).

The comment that came in third in insightful dominated the funny category, so we'll revisit it in the second half of this post.