The New Economics of Music, or, why stealing feels so right

I started a facebook group yesterday to discuss all aspects of Bubblegeneration/Umair Haque, FYI:<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5842972550" rel="nofollow">http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5842972550</a><p>Obviously, the game is in reducing search costs.<p>The REAL issue I see here for all these "music recommendation" startups is that they still are nowhere near competing with quality human DJ/knowledge.<p>There are thousands of music supervisors, party Dj's, and just general record nerds whose recommendations/playlists CRUSH last.fm, et al.<p>Somebody needs to build the Digg of music, moderated by people with real music knowledge.<p>That's the moneymaker.<p>All this implicit listening information is garbage.

interesting article, but i'm not sure if I agree. <p>I think iTunes reduces a lot of the risk the article is revolving around (of buying something you didn't like in the first place). I think most P2P downloads are of songs one heard on the radio. If I wanted to discover new music I'd go for Pandora or last.fm instead of illegal downloads.<p>I can say from personal experience that when I was a student and was low on cash I felt bad about spending 20 dollars at a time on an album (out of which I liked a couple of songs). Buying songs from iTunes allowed me to buy what I wanted or get entire albums for $10 dollars. But even that didn't allow me to get all the music I wanted on a student budget.<p>Now that I have a job I ended up spending hundreds of dollars on iTunes over time because for the most part it was less time consuming than finding the music on P2P networks. Once my time became valuable buying music started to make sense.