The Media Revolution
I grew up witnessing the music revolution. While still being in Russia, I travelled to the United States in the summer of 2000. In Lafayette, California, I was at home with my friends’ family. They had a big rich million dollar home, and had the fastest internet possible at that time — T1, a 1 megabit/s connection. It was insanely fast by my standards.
Back in Moscow I enjoyed unreliable 33.6K via the modem for a “low” price of around $1/hour. In Moscow, I’d try downloading a song or two I liked — each would take about 30–40 minutes if downloaded during the day, or about 15 minutes if downloaded at night (copper wires; shared capacity).
Other option for Muscovites would be to go to any subway station, and right in front of the entrance you can buy any music CD imaginable. They would cost $2. There were a couple of “legal” stores, but CDs there were priced at $20, unattainable for most people at the time.
In 2000, sitting in a home in Lafayette, I was introduced to Napster. It was magic. Any album, any artists — you could get it all for free in just a matter of minutes, if not seconds.
I quickly burned through all the CD-Rs that my friends had, and they had to introduce me to eBay, where I purchased a bulk order of 100 CD-Rs on a spindle. I burned them all, and came back to Moscow the happiest kid ever — I had all the music I should ever need, for free!
Fast forward 15 years later. We no longer buy CD’s. I bought the last one maybe in 2004, not because I needed one, but because I wanted to support the artist. I don’t even buy from iTunes. It all changed, seemingly overnight, to simply streaming. Pandora, Spotify, Songza, 8tracks, you name it.
This shift was unthinkable 15 years ago. No one could have told you that people would be comfortable paying for “virtual” stuff like this and that the companies would be willing to give away so much of it for free.
In the end, we settled in the middle — ad-supported lower-quality free streaming or ad-free premium offering.
Same thing happened to videos. From pirated cassettes and terrible voice-overs in the last days of the Soviet Union to Netflix. With iTunes or Amazon rentals, HBO and Netflix, there’s no more need to psychically own the media. When we moved to Canada, we brought with us a few dozens of videotapes — what a waste would be to do that today!
It’s funny, actually — when we moved to Canada in 2001, we were each allowed to bring 64 kilograms of stuff with us. The bulk of my things were hardcover books, ripped audio CD’s, a few videocassettes and magazines. I valued the experience of media so much, that I didn’t care for clothes or anything else. Nowadays, I don’t even carry music or videos in my pocket — it’s all in the cloud, available when you need it. Just stream it, don’t store it.
I think we’ll see the same happening to the photos. People take enormous amount of photos, and the days when Getty would send you print catalogue and charge arm and leg are pretty much over. We’ll have streaming too — unlimited, untethered, live collection of growing authentic photos from all over the world from people happily monetizing them. The market will figure a way to compensate people, same way as Spotify or Pandora or Netflix are negotiating the deals now… but without the extreme complexity of figuring out hundreds of custom contracts. At least not on the level of the average contributor.
I think in just 5 years we’ll take it all for granted. But for now, that remains a novelty.
