Consumer desire: vastly more important than DRM

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On December 14 CNN Money published an article on the success of comedian Louis CK’s experiment selling his comedy special DVD from his website direct to consumers. In just three days CK had gross sales of $500,000, a successful venture that should, as the article notes, make media companies nervous. But what starts out as a fact-based story on disintermediation slips into speculation about the role that selling the units DRM-free had in CK’s success: He was worried about piracy, and he’s been pleading with his fans to not put Read More …

Indie reviewers and the “loss” of cultural authority

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Yesterday I was going through publishing industry research that I’ve collected over the years, and came across this interview with four New York editors published in 2009 on the website Poets & Writers. About halfway through the interview, “[t]he end of cultural authority” came up as one of the most pressing problems facing the industry. The increasing authority of blogs and indie reviewers and online friends’ recommendations over that of a professional reviewer was cited as calamitous. Yet the calamity was not over the loss of cultural critique, of a Read More …