Nice piece Ed. I’d concur with “The real story is discoverability, identity and the uncomfortable fact that the bigger you get, the harder it becomes to know who you are”.
Yup - scale used to be built and earned giving massive strategic advantage to the owners of libraries. Now it can just be bought - the hard yards of creating a library are completely forgotten now and so if you can just buy size then it actually stops being a strategic advantage. It becomes a commodity, like digital storage...
Perhaps it’s analogous in music to how all those CDs on our shelves and digital downloads in MP3 and WAV have been rendered irrelevant and sunk as costs in the streaming tsunami.
Nice piece Ed. I’d concur with “The real story is discoverability, identity and the uncomfortable fact that the bigger you get, the harder it becomes to know who you are”.
But “scale is a commodity now.”?
Yup - scale used to be built and earned giving massive strategic advantage to the owners of libraries. Now it can just be bought - the hard yards of creating a library are completely forgotten now and so if you can just buy size then it actually stops being a strategic advantage. It becomes a commodity, like digital storage...
Perhaps it’s analogous in music to how all those CDs on our shelves and digital downloads in MP3 and WAV have been rendered irrelevant and sunk as costs in the streaming tsunami.
Exactly right!