Dream of the Popping Bubble
I used to work for Excite as a producer back in 1997 and at the time the company was worth a few hundred million dollars. When it merged with @Home, 2 years after I left, the deal was valued at $7.8 Billion. Yesterday,
the whole site was sold for $10 million. While many people reaped tremendous personal wealth from this and many other Internet deals, we can now clearly see that, at the end of the day, the once great
idolized internet investors created no shareholder value. It was all a dream. Pop.
The 9 Lives of File Sharing
Been playing with Morpheus, the file sharing app that has quickly replaced Napster as the source for free music. I'm sure it's only a matter of time until the record labels shut these guys down. They were sued on October 3 [
see article]. There are also full movies available for download in full screen digital video! No doubt the MPAA will go after them as well. I have used AudioGalaxy Satellite which has a great selection of tunes, but is web based instead of a downloadable app like Morpheus and Napster. From my experience Morpheus is the easist to use and has the most features, so I strongly suggest you
check it out while you can. BTW, Napster has now cost BMG
over $100 Million to keep alive (doh!).
Once the labels shut the service down, It will be interesting to see what springs up in its place. Wired had
a recent article about the Instant messaging services (
AIM and
MSN Messenger) adding file sharing capabilities. I think this is really interesting because it will create micro communities of buddy lists that allow friends to share amongst themselves. With the proliferation of CD Burners (considered to be the most wanted christmas item this year), networks of friends can instantly grow their music collections without the use of a centeral service like Morpheus.
Speaking of growing my music collection...I realized that my record collection suffered from a lack of Jam-Band music and so I downloaded a bunch of Dead, Live Dave Matthews and some String Cheese Incident, a very cool blue grass cover band. The best tune by far was a 20 minute version of Dave Matthews #43 with a long jam session with Bela Fleck. The live bootleg scene is one of the best benefits of file sharing apps. - I love searching for bands and then checking out the live versions of hits. Also, the Dead and Phish and other Jam bands allow file sharing of their music for non-commercial use so you don't even have to feel guilty about loading your hard drive with hours of new music!
