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Raleigh, NC
Rebecca Fernandez is a Principal Program Manager at Red Hat, leading projects to help the company scale its open culture. She's an Open Organization Ambassador, contributed to The Open Organization book, and maintains the Open Decision Framework. She is interested in the intersection of open source principles and practices, and how they can transform organizations for the better.
Authored Comments
...the open access crowd. Their original line of thinking was that the cost was just in production, and once it was "live," the costs would approach zero. As it turned out, that wasn't the case, despite the large costs of printing, because the demands of today's web users are not small. They want ongoing web services around the content they're browsing/buying, and that isn't free. Many times, they're only dealing with text and small image files, not even media files (which are of course much larger).
In the case of digital content, for traditional media companies a big chunk of change still goes into the artist promotions, new album promotions, studio time, etc. (Indie artist Jennifer Knapp remarked when her latest album was released that their hope was to at least break even, when sales were compared to the cost of the studio production... and she is fairly well-known!) The cost of materials and shipping, like any other business, are not the bulk (from what I can gather, anyway). One CD costs what, pennies, these days? And the square footage it takes on a shelf, not much more.
Now I do think there's merit to the idea that digital content can be more self-promoting than physical media, but I doubt it replaces it to a large degree for most artists.
I would be interested to see an actual break-down of the numbers, though. My understanding is that many artists don't even begin to earn much until they tour, because the studio and other costs eat up the pre-tour record sales. Maybe a myth?
would be to come up with a third-party or Google-vetted certification program for apps, just like other open source vendors have done. This would basically give an "It will work well" seal of approval to an app on a specific version of Android on a specific hardware, and users could then search the market for only certified apps, if they are looking for that.
There are definite improvements that need to be made to the Android market, but I think this one would go a long way toward addressing Apple's new attack.