Sequoia Capital recently made a presentation to their portfolio companies on how to survive the economic downturn. Even if that part of the presentation isn’t relevant to you, there is some incredible charts and data displaying how the economy got to where it is and how it has impacted different industries or verticals.
I was having beers with a couple of friends the other night and we were talking about digital distribution of music and one of my friends remarked on having heard Steve Jobs once say that he didn’t feel that iTunes was competing with CDs, but that it was competing with piracy. I responded that that wasn’t how it looked from where I was sitting as iTunes has competed very well with CDs, pushing them down the path towards obsolescence while music piracy (I was thinking strictly downloads) is still going strong.
This lead me to begin to think about what was competing with illegal downloading and the answer more or less hit me in the face- streaming. As someone who has a copious number of MP3s of questionable provenance on my various hard drives and listens to music on a regular basis, I was surprised to realize that I have only downloaded 3 albums in the last 6 months (for comparison, at one point I would say I was downloading about 5 per day). It was such a gradual transition that I hadn’t really considered the implications of it or had even really been cognescent of it. More than 95-100% of the music I listen to on a daily basis comes to me streamed from services ranging from the blatantly illegal (you know who you are) to the legally ambiguous (Seeqpod) to the fully legitimate (imeem). Online streaming has all but killed off (illegal) downloading in my life. While this revelation was a little slow in the coming for me (so slow in fact that MySpace beat me to it), it gave me something to think on.
As mobile bandwidth becomes increasingly more accesible, the idea of a music collection will cease to exist. All MP3 devices will have network capabilities. Who needs a 120GB iPod when all the world’s music is just a wireless connection away? So if the evolution of music consumption in recent years is as follows, CD, MP3, streaming, what comes next? If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t have time to write rambling blog posts, but if Steve Jobs or anybody who else who claims to be competing with pirates wants to win, they better figure it out first or remain flexible enough to adjust and adapt when someonelse does.
The fact that I haven’t posted about this site yet shows how negligent I have been with this blog. Not too long ago, a friend of mine and a few of his buddies launched a site called Cameesa. Cameesa could be best described as Fundable meets Threadless. It works as follows (I hope they won’t mind me stealing this graphic from their site):
While the site hasn’t taken off yet, they have managed to produce one completely crowdfunded shirt and a couple others are real close (the Day of Bad Rain and Skulls are Still Kool! are 90% funded) and the number of good designs continues to increase. Each week there seems to be a couple more shirts added to the list of production candidates that are definitely worthy to wear. Their community also appears to be growing at a healthy rate with lengthy threads attached to many of the designs.
While I don’t see Cameesa threatening Threadless anytime soon, I think the fact that they have produced one T-shirt and are on the verge of a few more shows that their model could work if they are able to sustain growth. It may also signal that the North American market may be ready to see more commercial crowdfunding applications and perhaps that is the most exciting part of Cameesa, by building this site, they have created a crowdfunding platform that could be leveraged across multiple verticals. While I do like Fundable, I think the first commercial crowdfunding application to gain mainstream traction will be one that will be focused on a specific vertical or function, allowing for a more straightforward user experience. Whether or not Cameesa, strikes it big, I am expecting exciting things from the team behind it in the coming months (you can follow their adventures on their blog).
Google is now providing select customers with the ability to embed videos within PPC results (check out the second sponsored result). I am sure this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Google will enable in search results, both paid and organic in the next few years. Once these type of features become enabled for organic search results (which should present enough incentive for web developers to adopt some standardization in terms of microformats), we really will begin to see the next generation of search results emerge.
Update: I should have taken a screenshot as it looks like the experiment is over.
