> What we see in writing and music is a failure of an old
> form of commodification and attempts to find new ways of
> commodifying them that may be successful to some extent ...
Yes: this is not a case of consumers failing to buy; this is a case of advertisers failing to buy. Consumers have always been fickle with respect to purchasing art, music, writing -- much easier to borrow a book from the library; listen to music "randomly" on the radio; watch the ballet on broadcast PBS. The Internet doesn't change that, it just makes the lazy people suddenly "rich" with (largely free) content. But no one is "losing" money on this kind of thing, at least not in the traditional sense. The people benefiting the most from it are those who wouldn't have paid (much) for media in the first place.
In another post, shag reminds us:
> It's "free" to the consumer, but only because advertisers
> are paying Google, covering their development costs and lining
> their pockets with profit.
Google is driving their own herse to the graveyard. With their promise of quantifying the impact of advertising, they have driven down the net total amount of advertising dollars being spent, because as you get to know more how effective it is, the only conclusion is that it's not very effective at all -- and thus it should be cheaper.
Later, rinse, repeat ... as they used to say.
One day, soon, Google will have dropped the price of advertising to the point where, despite the fact that they are the only ones able to sell more, it will be worthless. Advertising was invented by a snake-oil salesman; it's going to die soon, within my lifetime for sure.
What will replace it, if anything? Beats me.
/jordan