Perceived value of music
I belong to the generation that the music-industry hates. People my age don’t feel that there is anything wrong with downloading music (or video-content). Some artists understand that, most labels definitly do not. On podcasts like TWIT they often debate why ‘young people’ don’t feel like they have to pay for music, and usually come to a conclusion like ’they never learned the value of music’, ‘they don’t see that it’s stealing’ or ‘they’re just not used to paying for music’.
The last argument is where I believe the answer lies. Every since I was a child I have been bombarded with entertainment, everywhere I look there is some sort of media screaming for my attention. Whether it’s on TV, radio, print, my ipod or the internet, there is an abundance of media to be consumed. It’s a simple question of supply and demand. Our demand for media has increased in the last couple of years, but the supply of media has gone throuhg the roof. When the supply increases more than the demand, the price goes down, way down.
Apparantly the people that work at music labels missed that essential point of economics in their education. Instead of improving the perceived value of their product or lowering their price, they started to sue. Maybe, just maybe, people in the music industry should get used to making a normal living and not having a new house on MTV Cribs every week. The service they provide is just not that valuable anymore.
Just last month I did pay for music, I bought the song codemonkey from Jonathan Coulton. Why? because I love that song and Coulton makes an effort to make a living as an independant artist. I know that I’m giving my money to him, not some corporation.
The music industry should start seeing playing music is a promotional tool to get people to come to a performance, not the other way around. The music industry should applaud people spreading their promotion material via the internet (spending their time) for free instead of suing the living daylights out of everyone who downloads a song.
Doing something RAD with E-mail
Recently I have gotten a lot of questions about how it is possible that I have an empty e-mail inbox, both in private e-mail and in work email. In the last years I have developed a system that seems to work for me based on Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero idea and the whole ‘Getting Things Done’-mantra. For me this comes down to a few simple rules:
- my inbox is my ToDo list, if a message is still in my inbox it means I have to do something RAD with it
- ‘Doing something RAD’ can mean three things: Respond, Archive, Delete
- Respond: if a message requires a response and I can respond immediatly I will, sometimes it will take some time when it requires a longer response or when I deem the message to be not urgent.
- Archive: When I have responded to a message I archive the message in a folder (work) or I tag it and archive it (private/gmail). As long as the message has some valid information I archive it somewhere for whenever I might need it. This also explains my love for gmail (google for your domain) and it’s incredible search function. What really helps is if people use proper e-mail etiquette and and at least use descriptive subjects. Also flagging messages (Outlook) or adding a star to them (gmail) helps with archiving important messages.
- Delete: messages that are spam, bacn, or when there is no response necessary are deleted.
This way I see that if messages start buidling up in my inbox I know I have stuff to do. Some people might say that they have so much e-mail coming into their inbox that they can’t keep up, that’s where filters come in. In both Outlook and gmail I have set up filters that remove unimportant stuff from my inbox like administrative notifications (work) facebook or twitter notifications (private). Invest some time in setting up filters that catch stuff you don’t want to see immediatly.
On a final note, remember that e-mail is asynchronous communication, if people really need something from you immediatly let them give you a call, don’t build up expectations that you will answer every message instantly.
Mac app: Namely
Love this little program!!
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